Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram

My concern about PG isn't that he's "falling in line" so much as ripping the mask off and embracing right-wing authoritarianism:

  So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat. Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever.

  In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of political correctness, but the next thing like it?

  The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

https://paulgraham.com/woke.html (this entire essay is pathetically ignorant even by PG's standards, but the latent fascism is still very scary)

I personally think it's a bad example: they censored this story while there were wild speculations. But at the end, it had negligible impact on the news. As soon as it appeared that the story was not a political mis/disinformation, it was not suppressed anymore.

If anything, it just shows that they are censoring based on facts: if there are established facts about Hunter Biden's laptop, then the information cannot be censored.

It is obvious to me that any brand new story is first "unestablished". They are indistinguishable from rumors. If you start choosing and picking "this story sounds nice to me, so let's not censor it even if it's not confirmed yet, this story is not confirmed yet either but let's censor it", then, it is arbitrary. The fact that a story starts as not confirmed and then turn out to be confirmed is not the proof something is wrong, on the opposite.

I think it's the problem of people who think "facts" are just "opinions" and that you can modify them as you want. They don't understand how "facts" work, and that it requires time for the confidence to grow. I also think that they sometimes get confused because they want very much to believe in some "opinions" or "fake news", but then people are saying, correctly, that this is not based on facts, so their only resort is to pretend this "opinion" or "fake news" is as factual as the other facts, but therefore it means that indeed, "facts" have no objectivity, everyone can just say "it's a fact" or "it's not a fact" based on what they want to hear.

Ultimately, it is the same as censorship. That's why it's so tough to find the right balance between fostering a community and extinguishing it.

We call it differently because its purpose is different, not its actions.

Capitalism can be just as fascist and authoritarian as communism. Capitalism and communism are economic ideologies. Fascism and authoritarianism are political systems.

Expected behavior can be concerning when it occurs.