Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

Maybe we attack should sleazy commerce rather than speech?

The reason people go in for crank ideas is because they recognize that the people who sell them things are constantly manipulating them. They work so they don't have time to investigate everything themselves, so as a proxy many tend to believe marginal people who they don't know at all due to the signal that their speech is being suppressed by known liars who are never called out because of their power.

Meanwhile, the upper middle-class people who provide the infrastructure and strategy for the biggest frauds are smug in the belief that their betters are being honest about what is true and false, because their income depends on it.

The problem with people is that they are unmoored, with absolutely no sources of information that are not trying to squeeze cash out of them. They come up with sketchy heuristics to give them some semblance of stability between shifts at work and climbing pointless complications in their lives created by rent-seekers.

The problem with the comfortable upper middle-class is that they are too moored, too sure they're at the end of history. Too sure that they know what is true between stitching together half-remembered NYT and WaPo headlines with their discussions with each other at restaurants and dinner parties. Too sure that truth can and should be dictated by people who have a better degree than they do. As if maintaining that comfort is not an interest, as if bias towards themselves as "the middle" is actually the definition of being unbiased.

If that's the world you want, good news, that's the world we have now. And the magic of AI and recommender systems has disrupted that old and stupid model of if "it bleeds it leads" to get you outraged faster and with far less effort than it used to take in the old and stupid days.

But that's not the world I want to live in personally and if it takes some imperfect even sometimes ham-fisted regulation to get us to a better place I'm willing to deal with that rather than embrace the status quo because it sucks and it's just getting worse as the tools to hack social media have been democratized at scale.

Ideally I'd love to let the free marketplace of ideas work this out (and it eventually will and I am a huge believer in weakly efficient marketplaces), but unless I get a 1000 plus year lifespan, I only have so many years left in my lightcone so I side with being more proactive.

We do not, in fact, have Nazis.

Allow me to re-phrase:

Yes, censorship is bad, but which is worse: admitting a little bit of censorship, or Islamic Terrorists? Because uh, right now, we have Islamic Terrorists.

At least one was real in the last couple decades.

You should familiarize yourself with the rest of post-War 20th century history in the United States, then. Far, far more deadly and dangerous "conspiracy theories" existed before the internet and caused actual deaths of sitting politicians. It's the Presentism of all of this that is making people forget how pernicious it is, letting these powerful organizations have this authority to ban "misinformation".