What's stopping corporate authoritarians from instantly shutting down all left-wing Internet content? Shouldn't we be preparing for that?

Because as long as they have us convinced that's it's "left vs right" than we won't be unified enough to fight the real war, which is "Corporations vs the rest of us".

Because leftist shitposting online doesn't actually lead to anything, and providing us with a safe outlet for our frustrations serves to keep people apathetic and afraid to fight back.

Even if such a thing like total social media control were possible, and you're posting this on a leftist decentralized social media platform so the premise is already false, they just have no reason to take any action. What would be more likely is they would have bots and shills trying to keep content more "rah rah CEO bad" and less "The CEO of Anthem BlueCross BlueShield lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, a state well known for their incredibly lax gun laws."

I think it's because it's not even remotely on their radar. They're fighting a class war and obliterating an opponent that barely knows its fighting. Meanwhile the rest of us are doing a really really good job at dividing ourselves up for them and making their job exponentially easier.

They love that we've bought into the whole left vs. right idea hook line and sinker, what they couldn't have counted on is how we continued to divide ourselves into smaller and smaller circles that refuse to play with each other.

Why would they bother silence us when the best we can muster is a bunch of memes and squabbling?

Im on mobile so sorry for the basic link and typos. May clean it up later.

TLDR Mike Masnick has long worked out it is impossible (even with AI) to do content moderation of large social media well. Bad content (nazi rhetoric, Christian nationalism, islamist terrorists signaling each other, CSAM, human trafficking, penis pill ads, auto warranty extensions and so on.)

So left wing rhetoric will still get through. And far left rhetoric and embarrassing coverage of the elite (e.g. couch fucking) will become popular.

So bring it!

They have zero reason to stop it, it is that simple.

Remember that online plattforms earn money through ads and engagement.

If the last decade has shown us anything it is that online plattforms thrive on division.

Isn’t this exactly what happened to the right? They were kicked off of Reddit and Twitter so they started Truth social? Then Elon bought Twitter and it has being less moderated.

Sudden wide-spread crackdowns lead to a lot of backlash. Corporations aren't going to do this because there's no legitimate benefit to them for doing it. Additionally, the left-wing gets very little representation in the US at least so why stoke anger and resentment when the right is already controlling everything?

If only life were so simple. There's a warehouse full of reasons.

• Why should they care as long as it's just talk? Sites on the open internet that truly pose a threat in regards to organizing coordinated action to effect the powers that be do get attacked and taken down, regardless of political affiliation. It's not about politics, it's about protecting the money and power.

• Threats are easier to track, and organized movements are easier to infiltrate/disrupt, the more visible they are. Why would they choose to push anything they're concerned about deeper into places that are harder to track like private IRC, Signal, dark web, etc?

• General plan of attack as documented in leaked intelligence agency docs, is to infiltrate potential threats, manipulate to discourage direct action and to divide the group with an ever increasing list of concerns until they're spread too thin for action, then cause loss of momentum and or trust in leadership, then finally destroy if there's any reason to (usually the movements disperse and die on their own at this point). Look into Occupy Wallstreet and how it was derailed by introducing intersectionality into what was originally a clearly targeted movement based purely on class division.

• Controlled opposition is useful as hell. They can use their own resources to more easily influence groups when the groups are out in the open.

• Obvious direct censorship action tends to spur people to action, vs careful manipulation to ensure the pot doesn't boil over.

• You can make money off of all sides and discussions when you own the discussion sites, get to harvest all the data, and get to sell all the ads.

• Things are not nearly as centralized as you imply, and even getting all the big names and powers in line and coordinated to do anything in one fell swoop is nearly impossible. Systemic issues are difficult because it's not one source of rules and truth passing commands down, it's tons and tons of people effected by rules and expectations from all over the place, which collectively congeal together to cause the shit end results.

Taking notes

They wouldn't take the opportunity because what you lay out would require large scale cooperation of people who work at cross purposes. The GOP in Congress can't even pass a funding bill that Dear Leader supported without it being a crisis. They are not that united.

Because they are enjoying the content, just with a different sense of humor.

It's impossible to censor everything on the Internet. You can make it more difficult to access stuff you don't want people to see but it's ultimately impossible to block it all for everyone.

Wanna really decentralize the internet?

Learn and use I2P.

Oversimplified: Its a backbone for an internet based off of a p2p, torrent like framework.

Sure they could do that with centralized social media as long as the respective owners are on board, but with the wider internet as a whole it's not that easy. I'm sure someone that's more knowledgeable can expand on this, but you're talking about first identifying all of the sites/domains that need to be blocked (assuming more don't pop up while you're tabulating), and then getting every ISP and search provider in the country to simultaneously kill those hostnames in their DNS registers. You'd still have to coerce overseas operators to do the same, or block traffic out of the country (good luck because a, business require international communication, and b, many US based providers serve those outside the US).

Sure they could (and probably will) do some shenanigans to severely cripple our means of fighting back, but like piracy, this is the internet; we always find a way around their bullshit.

Mainly because you forgot about the rest of the world. In whatever country you're thinking of, corporations could try that, and then anyone who was hosted abroad would still be online and everyone could just go access them.

The other point is that corporations compete against each other. Sometimes they will work together in order to screw over the general public, but they will also work against each other to make an extra buck. That unity that you think exists on the right, it actually doesn't.

My theory is that not all people are hardliners. They are misrepresented for the opposing propaganda. It's always exciting to present the other side with full outrage.

I personally think that outrage is evil. It polarizes and is not based on facts, but emotions. People who produce and publish outrage want to destroy the country and its society.

That's why you won't see much of the things you're worried about. You'll only see tendencies, because there're really a few hardliners somewhere.

Most democratic countries have "rule of law" (its getting eroded in the US, but still...), and people have the expectation of the government not censoring things. Besides, VPN and Tor can bypass restrictions, so its a futile attempt with a huge backlash, and if VPN and Tor are banned too, I'm pretty sure there are people, both left of center and right of center are not gonna be happy about that. Magats might not care about "leftist" sites being banned, but they'll start worrying if they are next, and once you do a VPN and Tor ban too, oh I'm sure they'll be throwing a fit like those anti-mask protests, this time with with both left and right wing people in unity. Yea, maybe its not a good idea to get people united across the spectrum.

Like, many democratic countries (particularly, western democratic countries) can't even get people to wear masks, or vaccinate, or even just stay at home, even when its a reasonable thing to do. Internet censorship is gonna cause riots, this time, with not just right-wing nut jobs, but people across the political spectrum.

Honestly, the powers that be probably prefer people have these discussions online. First, most people who post even inflammatory content like Luigi memes are just venting. I'll make such posts and comments, but honestly, never in a dozen lifetimes am I personally going to attempt to repeat his actions.

Second, the thing about the Internet is anyone can read it. Machine learning is deployed right now at a vast scale to trawl all corners of the web and find any instances of people actually actively planning acts of revolutionary violence. As tools for plotting actual acts of violence, social media sucks. Luigi succeeded because the whole thing was plotted in the one place the NSA can't probe - the contents of a single man's mind.

Third, you have to look beyond the Day of the Great Banning that you propose. What happens next? Well, tens of millions of disgruntled progressives and leftists are still going to want a place to vent or make their feelings known. And if the Internet is out, that just leaves good old fashioned IRL organizing. And it's a hell of a lot more difficult to monitor in person groups that do all their activities with pen and paper than it is for bots to monitor social media for potential threats. Also, when people meet in person, they start discussing en masse various means of fighting back, non-violently or violently. People meeting in such groups can also radicalize each other. Someone who once was content just to post a Luigi meme might instead become radicalized and seek to hold in-person protests to call for his pardoning, hold non-violent actions to disrupt the trial, or in the extreme, even form a violent group to try and bust him out of jail. Fewer people will be willing to go up each step of that ladder, but the potential exists.

Really, social media largely serves the powers that be. It's like an emergency release valve for society's collective rage. It doesn't have no effect, over time it can shift the zeitgeist enough to eventually effect actual government policy. But no one is going to successfully cook up a neo-leninist uprising on any fediverse instance, let alone on Bluesky. In a world of hyper-monitored electronic communication, any real revolutionary acts are plotted in person, on paper, or through entirely private encrypted communications.

They want money and losing half their audience would cost them money.

They do it slowly and systematically embrace extend extinguish

Why would anyone shutdown the majority of their customers?

Think about it like this, for decades they have been moving forward their agenda at a snails pace slowly turning up the temperature of the water. The water has just started to simmer, but if you turn up the heat too suddenly and the water boils too quickly the frog will realize he's being boiled and fight to escape, however if you keep slowly bringing up the heat as they have all these years, then we (the frog) won't see it coming and slowly boil to death.

The powers that be need a place where citizens can feel like they're making real change. Also a place to radicalize and misinform and sow division. "Left Wing" outlets are perfect for that.

Worry when they start cracking down on encrypted messaging and start abducting protestors and organizers off of the streets.

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland

How is everyone involved gonna secretly collude without anyone else finding out about the plan? Lmao

China's good at this kind of thing, could go to them for advice on setting it up.

What's stopping corporate authoritarians from instantly shutting down all left-wing Internet content?

Borders.

Pretty sure they're planning on it

It's more useful for them to subvert it to sew division. Look at how they started pushing identity politics after occupy wall street.

Why do you assume that freedom of speech will automatically be gone? It's the only one of all the human rights that Usamericans know, after all.

Signal to noise is all edffd up