Literally noone could have seen this coming. /s
edit: XCabbage better explains what I was trying to say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191253
That is so completely obvious that it boggles the mind that I even needed to say it.
What I'm saying is, China is co-opting modern liberal censorship in the West to do it's own political censorship (edit: in the West).
No, it’s using good old greater-pile-of-money diplomacy. SJWs aren’t running around rooting for Xi. This is a company with major economic exposure to China bowing to censors’ wills.
The point was that “ China is co-opting modern liberal censorship” to advance its agenda.
That’s simply not the case. One is driven by mass outrage—bottom up. The other by central diktat—top down. They’re separate and unconnected vectors.
The default response to any problem is now censorship and banning. We've trained corporations to take the easiest path and never stand up for speech or unpopular views being pushed on their platforms.
This idea that we can easily define was is 'not okay' to say on the internet from a rational leftist perspective and expect it all to just work out in the end is laughable and constantly being proven wrong.
These same left leaning people would never hold this sort of trust in big institutions to make these decisions in any other case. It's actually scary that so many people are so happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater to serve some political ends.
There's a very good reason ACLU defended the right for neo-Nazis to protest in the streets for decades (including their work allowing Charlottesville to happen). Precedent matter.
Blizzard et al should have taken a stand against regulating the speech of their customers private lives long ago. And I'm not talking about forum moderation in individual communities which has its own rules of civil discourse.
No it isn't. That is to say, censorship and banning are less of a problem now than they've been at any other time in US history.
We have something special here where we can make a stand and protect our internet celebrities the same way we have if it wasn't on the internet. Far too many people are cynically willing to give it up either for political ends and ignore the early censorship by nation states believing both would be contained within a manageable subset and won't be both broaded used against legitimate dissents or openly abused to silence ideological opponents.
This is the natural and predictable outcome, the conditional free speech policy thing doesn't when it faces the reality on the ground.
And as I've said multiple times today this has nothing to do with how discourse is moderated on internet forums. The rules of civil discourse in individual communities is much more flexible than defining it purely on the loudest complainers political redlines.
No it isn't. This is alarmism.