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Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.
https://x.com/i/status/2037324942069342679
YouTube was the most important platform for reaching The Youth and also uniquely compatible with monetization, allowing independent political/intellectual entrepreneurs to make a career. Closed 2015-2019.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324944204247140
Reddit was known for its "anything goes" speech policy in 2015, and was the hub for text-based debate between normal people on opposing sides of issues. Turned into a leftist echo-chamber to spite r/TheDonald.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324947412975892
Amazon, with its dominance of the e-book and e-commerce markets, played a similar political commissar role for aspiring authors and merch sellers.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324950407708819
Twitter, which dominated among cultural elites (journos, academics, politicians) went from "the free speech wing of the free speech party" to an extension of a partisan FBI with many different tiers of algorithmic manipulation for disfavored stories.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324953779912882
Facebook's closure was closely linked to German, EU, and British pressure after it was (mostly wrongly) blamed for opposition to the 2015 migrant crisis and Brexit. Significant because Facebook allowed the Internet to reach the Great Boomer Voter Mass.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324956925628609
Another thread, this one from DMs with a major Facebook group admin, on what was lost with Facebook's closure and the timeline (2015 migrant crisis to Biden's inauguration).
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324959635107974
Apple's role was more through intimidation/chilling effects than direct censorship; there were only a few removals but given Apple mobile dominance they had a big effect.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324962432782689
You might say "it's OK, it's the Internet, even if you're kicked off the major platforms you can make your own website/forum and people can find you"... except Google also changed their search algorithm to avoid non-mainstream sites and sources.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324965192601716
...and if you can survive getting booted off every major platform and Google search, your cloud providers/payment processors/DDoS protection/ISPs/domain registrars might coordinate to nuke you off the Internet anyways.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324967906283874
I don't think it matters, but our political vocabulary is much better at fighting formal state tyranny than decentralized networks controlling a handful of nominally private chokepoints, so it's worth pointing out 5eyes was probably involved.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324970645176569
On top of covert involvement, many Western governments participated directly and formally with wide-ranging moderation and censorship laws and "guidelines," especially Germany, Britain, the EU, and Australia.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324973702889875
The EU, with its phenomenal market size and lack of meaningful internal opposition, was particularly important.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324976110305419
In order to do this moderation, tech companies needed "ground truth," which was outsourced to an ostensibly neutral (in reality very partisan) network of NGO fact-checkers.
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324979432255956
Funnily enough, just as tech was making their ostensible roles (uncovering and disseminating info) obsolete, journalists became deputized as truth oracles and gained official subsidies and privileges (like exemptions from German speech laws).
x.com/arctotherium42…
https://x.com/i/status/2037324981789462793
In all cases, there was a very clear progression: each platform started by going after Neo-Nazis and similarly unsympathetic groups and within a couple of years escalated to alt-center, mainstream conservatives and mild-mannered academic types (psychometrics).
https://x.com/i/status/2037324984196944234
I gave the timeline as 2015-2022, but it's never actually stopped, just somewhat receded thanks to the Musk thaw, the extreme excess during the lockdowns (eg shutting down lab leak discussion) provoking a backlash, and Republican officials wising up to what was going on.
https://x.com/i/status/2037324986940088458
There were two distinct phases:
1) 2015-2019, started by the migrant crisis, Brexit, and Trump I, which destroyed the Internet Right.
2) 2020-2022, related to the 2020 election and the lockdowns, which massively intensified everything and went after normies.
https://x.com/i/status/2037324989062340940
The effect of this on Internet discourse was to not only shift it extremely far to the left but to dumb it down. Like unpredictable environments leading to r-selection, ubiquitous censorship discouraged original research or high-effort books/essays/videos in favor of memes.
Seeing this happen in real time was immensely blackpilling and the fact that it isn't even widely-known and discussed that this happened (almost entirely in the last 11 years) is a travesty. "Closure of the Internet" is 1000 times worse than McCarthyism ever was.
I regret not being able to do this topic justice; it really needs a proper book/documentary/TV series, with interviews with key participants (eg Vijaya Gadde) and a look through archives of major institutions. Tweet threads and essays are not enough.
Someone needs to hunt down the journalists who initially began the anti-YouTube ad press campaign and interview them.
If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.
The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.
A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.
Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."
One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.
If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...
Alcohol and tobacco are available on every street corner.
Cigarettes proven to cause cancer. Alcohol proven to destroy the liver, the brain, the marriage, and the careful plans of an entire weekend.
Both legal. Both taxed. Both stocked at the petrol station.
Raw milk, on the other hand, sold by a farmer three miles down the road from a cow that has a name, must apparently be regulated as a public health threat.
The petrol station sells nicotine pouches, vodka, energy drinks containing seven grams of taurine and a kilogram of sugar, and an entire wall of ultra-processed snacks designed by chemists.
The farm gate down the lane sells a glass of milk. The same milk humans have been drinking for ten thousand years.
The petrol station is fine. The farm gate is the problem.
You can decide which of these your government is actually trying to protect you from.
https://x.com/i/status/2060387799908626776
Raw milk is a nutritional powerhouse like no other. That’s why it’s illegal. They only want us ...
Activist: "Your cows are putting carbon into the atmosphere."
Farmer: "Where did they get it?"
Activist: "What?"
Farmer: "The carbon. Where did the cow get it before it put it anywhere."
Activist: "From... eating?"
Farmer: "From eating grass. And where did the grass get it."
Activist: "The soil?"
Farmer: "The air. The grass pulled it out of the air last spring. The cow ate the grass. The cow breathed some of it back out. It went back into the air it came from."
Activist: "But it's still going into the atmosphere."
Farmer: "It's going back. There's a difference between a thing going somewhere and a thing going back. You've described a circle and you're frightened of it."
Activist: "Then just don't have the cow."
Farmer: "The grass still dies in autumn. It rots where it falls. The carbon goes back into the air either way, just without anyone getting fed in the middle."
Activist: "It's not that simple."
Farmer: "It's grass, cow, breath, grass. Or it's grass, rot, air, grass. Same circle, fewer dinners. ...
