Re:I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine
by throwaway8581 on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @11:07AM
(#26251413)
I think one useful metric is what percent of the population falls inside of the overton window that makes you unemployable in any upper middle class job (ie jobs that make it possible for you to acquire power). Jared Taylor, for example, was a translator for law firms for a long time after publicly and prominently saying that immigration should be curtailed for the sake of keeping the white percentage of the population higher. It was a quite unpopular view even then but it didn’t matter because whatever, it’s just his personal political views.
Nowadays, even believing something that half or more of the population believes is far outside of the Overton window and will ruin your career.
Re:I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine
by int_19h on Monday March 01, 2021 @03:59PM
(#26308334)
That example demonstrates that one particular view became less tolerated; what about others? E.g. if one went around openly espousing Maoism around that time, how would that affect employment prospects in law firms?
That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos?
(FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)