Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech.

More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real.

One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.

> I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired

In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.

True, but as long as people are willing to self censor then it doesn't matter if they would be punished if they spoke out, because they won't. Perceived risk is indistinguishable from actual risk if that risk is avoided by total avoidance.

Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.

Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.

The appearance of persecution has always been a tool of censorship. Chilling effects etc.

It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.

>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it?

The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.

I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…

They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).

Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.

Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.

But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.

I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.

Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …

I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.

The definition of “dangerous” has become rather flimsy these days.

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win.

Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

>Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

You keep using this word, "fringe". I don't think it means what you think it means...

"Fringe" and "extremist" are relative terms.

By definition whoever wins the most votes is mainstream, not a fringe extremist.

Well, there are only 2 real candidates, so yes the likely republican nominee is a likely candidate to win. The polls all show democrats losing in a landslide in the midterms. That puts the republican nominee in very good position.

Aren't his favorables better than Biden's and Harris's? [1]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/02/18/...

Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the hell Biden has going for him. Once again the Democrats will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was.

It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.

> It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?

>I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird.

Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0].

Of course, this meant Republicans avoided mail-in voting en masse, so when the (primarily Democratic) mail-in ballots came in after the initial numbers appeared to favor Trump, and the tide turned against him, the cries of fraud only became louder.

That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents, even if he has to drink from it afterwards. It's political because he made it political, the way he made masks and vaccination political because he thought COVID would distract from his narrative of a "roaring economy" and because he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak in front of the press, who he considered his enemy.

[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/24/why-trumps-...

> That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents

Not a fan of Trump either, but would things have been so much better with Hillary as President? Her actions are equally if not more heinous than Trump. She’s just not as obvious about it.

Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.

> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016.

That's both not true and trivially checkable.

In 2016, Trump won by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory.

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...

But you say only the electoral votes matter? Why does this weird three swing states that aren't even all the same so have different populations accross the elections margin matter?

I think what GP is saying is that even with large, multi-million margins in the popular vote, the result can still be "close" because many of those votes count for nothing in the electoral college. Hillary Clinton could have received four million fewer votes in California 2016 and she would still have won that state while losing the electoral college. But if she had merely won an extra ~100,00 votes in a few crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, America might have had its first female president.

I haven't checked the numbers but I think GP is arguing that the Biden-Trump result was "closer" in this sense than the Clinton-Trump result was; i.e. the margin in the electoral college and nationwide popular vote may have been wider, but 2020 was still a closer call in the small number of swing states that might have actually changed the overall result.

Ah, you're talking about the fewest number of regular votes that would have to change so that the electoral college would flip. in that case I'd say 42k and 77k are essentially the same number, given the large number of voters we're talking about. But yes, Biden's victory was tighter than Trumps in that calculus.

Although, in the situation you propose, 2020 would actually be a 269-269 tie. Which means any unfaithful elector could refuse to vote for their candidate and throw it to the other party. And even if no one did, then Congress would break the tie in a pair votes that would presumably go for Trump and Pence if people voted on a party line.

"Electoral votes" appears to be a term you've created to mean "the smallest number of votes it would be possible to flip to change the result of the election, if allocated perfectly", rather than what most people would assume you mean -- electoral college votes. Given your definition, you are basically correct.

Trump won 306-232 in 2016. With faithless electors, this became 304-227. He lost the popular vote. As you note, 77,000 votes in the three closest states could have flipped the election.

Biden won 306-232 in 2020 (the same margin, or better if you allow for the faithless electors). If he lost 42,000 votes it'd have been 269-269, which would have led to the House of Representative contingency, which might have elected either Biden or Trump (or ended in a different outcome, frankly). It'd take another 33,000 votes to give Trump an unambiguous win by flipping Nevada.

This is an interesting curiosity -- but for Aunt Maria getting the flu, the election could have been different! But we're in increasingly silly hypotheticals. Knowing what we know now, it's clear Clinton would have done more to target the states she narrowly lost. But the problem is that state votes are correlated with one another and so the number of hypotheticals you need to sustain to "flip" exactly those votes without turning out any additional votes or affecting the campaign strategies is pretty weird.

Even if you take the prototypical version of this question "Did Ralph Nader 'cost' Gore the 2000 presidential election by 'taking' at least 500 of his votes in Florida?" it's sort of a rabbit hole of absurdities. The answer is surely yes to the question, because the answer to any hypothetical is yes when the margin is that close. But beyond that not super productive.

In general I think most people would, collectively, analyze Biden's victory over Trump as somewhat more decisive than Trump's over Clinton or Bush's over Gore, though less decisive than either of Obama's or Bush 2004.

Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you.

Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already.

Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?

A scenario much like what you describe has sometimes been discussed by someone who did wind up moving their writing efforts to Substack later on:

> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

> So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

Also elaborated in the latter Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

> Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best.

I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m...

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22...

If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.

I don't read his blog.

Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric

Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?

If you don't read his blog then you probably shouldn't make claims about what he does or doesn't say in it, nor about the scientific literacy of his readers (much higher than average - they will happily peer review studies he posts and highlight in the comments when he's misinterpreted them or when the study is bad). So sure, he has responded to the Atlantic directly, many times.

The Atlantic on why Berenson was wrong: "[he is] arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can)."

The last three words are links to junk studies or articles of the sort that suddenly became fashionable after April 2020, after many years of studies saying there was no such evidence. But Berenson was and is correct. Mask mandates don't stop transmission or protect against COVID and this has been proven over and over again. Here's Berenson responding to this point by refuting it with another study, but this one is actually high powered and has a reasonable methodology (it isn't a dumb modelling study or lab experiment):

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/school-mask-mandates-use...

"On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed"

They were claimed to be 95% effective at stopping infection after two doses. Nobody has believed this for a long time, not even governments, which is why Israel is now up to 4 doses and it still isn't working. This claim was a correct reading of Israel's data.

Now, Berenson shoots from the hip. He likes to treat Substack as if it's Twitter and sometimes publishes stuff that turns out to be wrong. But he doesn't have to be right 100% of the time or even 50% of the time to beat the media outlets criticizing him. The Atlantic should especially pipe down because it's probably the Pandemic's Wrongest Publication:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-oh-my/comme...

They've served up some great headlines in recent times. October: "Four measures that are helping Germany beat COVID" (Germany is currently one of the most restrictive countries in Europe). December: "We know enough about Omicron to know we're in trouble" followed by in February: "Open everything: the time to end the pandemic is now".

Anyone reading Berenson has been consistently about 6-12 months ahead of the "mainstream" journalism curve. Anyone reading the Atlantic would have been exposed to a whiplashing of overwrought nonsense that bears no reality to what actually happened.

This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.

I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.

There's always this effect of "X says there are lots of foo, incredible amounts. But we are good people, which is why we believe that there is practically no foo."

"What, you disagree that we should kick off people who claim that we're wrong to say that there's practically no foo? Let me round you to the X's, who claim there's lots of foo, which is crazy."

(Of course, this caricature is immediately picked up by the people who actually do believe there's lots of foo, and who very much appreciate either them passing as moderates, or the moderates being counted as them.)

And, of course, the reverse. In an outrage-based social media landscape, it is impossible to be a moderate: you will be rounded off to the extremists regardless of what you actually say.

Voting machines are bad. Their use makes it easier to commit fraud. However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words) when they were demonstrably bluffing.

It is both the case that voting machines can be compromised and that we know the most well-advertised claims of election fraud in the 2020 election are themselves fraudulent.

https://blog.erratasec.com/2021/11/example-forensicating-mes...

>> However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words)

And the other side claimed absolute proof of no fraud?

If you're talking about experts in voting systems, no they didn't. Trump's CISA appointee to oversee election security, Chris Krebs, claimed the election was highly secure, which in a sense it was, because Trump had long been advertising concerns about the election which stimulated election security efforts. But in security you can never be completely sure the attacker doesn't have some trick you haven't thought of, so nobody competent claimed absolute proof of no fraud.