Who is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.

People like Musk who self identify as classical liberals, or whatever the faddish term for that happens to be.

Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.

Or it was just used against other people. You know, exiling gay kids from their families and friends has been a longtime tradition. Is that not “the hammer?”

It's not the same hammer I'm discussing. The equivalent would be censorship of pleas made in favor of homosexual causes, which the US is not particularly known for.

What? You don’t think women/homosexuals/minorities were barred from holding certain cultural megaphones?

Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

> Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored

He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.

> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

>Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.

The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.

No, “we” are not doing the same. In China the state compels private companies to hold and enforce certain positions toward certain speech. That’s exactly what the “anti-censorship” lobby is asking for, and it’s not at all what is happening today in the US.

Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.

Indeed, the relationship of the state and business does differ in China. In the US it is more decentralized.

To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.

I’m not an expert on censorship in China, so I won’t weigh in on that, but in the US it’s a non-issue. If you can’t discuss some conservative view on Twitter, move over to Truth Social or Gab or the many Mastodon instances that exist explicitly to host that content.

“X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument.

You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!

When you want to track censorship in those days, you'd typically look for lawsuits. The US had blasphemy laws in local areas for a long time, but those were rarely enforced or taken to court, for example.

This is a total non-sequitur and ends up being a self-defeating argument anyway.

You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.

I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.

The NAACP and other organizations existed at the same time as Jim Crow. The reality was that the extent of the racial oppression varied considerably based on geography. Many find the idea of current censorship more intimidating because it exists everywhere within the US and many places outside of it, so there would be no good way of escaping it - while many blacks instead had the option of fleeing northward.

Got it. Social media sites moderating content is at least as bad as Jim Crow. Truly striking argument, though probably in the opposite way as intended.

If you could guarantee the problems are limited to social media moderation, it would be no issue. But the kinds of people who cause bad social media moderation also have their pies in many other kinds of policies, and they want blood. The end result of this would be worse than Jim Crow because it would be applied nationwide.

I see... and I guess this argument is meant to be a testimony to one's ability to imagine worlds worse than Jim Crow?

There are many possible worlds that are far worse than Jim Crow. Sure. What does that have to do with reality again?

Should we be alarmed about people ordering at restaurants given that we can't guarantee they have no intention to eat the entirety of planet Earth?

I mean, people were blacklisted in the 50s for allegedly being communists, right? People were actually killed for opposing Jim Crow. We had codes about what you were allowed to show in movies and comics.

I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.

I’ve never seen anyone ”censored” on Twitter for opposing immigration.

It helps that neither of those sides were morally repugnant.

When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).

Slavery wasn't a new thing when the Constitution was written. The divide between the North and the South was noted by several founding fathers as a nasty issue, and it was probably a mistake to unite the two territories in such a way to begin with.

Hmm it was only on the fringes of culture that people were strongly against slavery around the founding of the country. Then there was a “moral awakening” via the Quakers that made it less and less culturally viable until culminating in open warfare.

So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.

The moral shift played a part in galvanizing enthusiasm for the war, but the Civil War ultimately was started by Northern statists who were adamant about maintaining a firm control over the North American heartland. Recall that the Emancipation proclamation came three years into the war.

Are you really pushing the Lost Cause narrative here? It’s revisionist history that’s widely rejected by historians. The main cause of the war was slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

The CSA seceded for the State's Right to Own Slaves. That much is obvious. The Northern response, as stated by Lincoln and understood by the majority of volunteers, was to Preserve the Union. That much is also obvious. Total abolitionism emerged only three years into the war. If the Northern population did not have a strong desire to Preserve the Union and only relied on abolitionist forces, then there would hardly have been a Civil War at all.

Northerners wanted control of the new territories because of slavery. Because at that point it was something most northerners did not want expanded across the rest of the continent as, again, a moral concern borne of a recent moral awakening.

It was an economic, political, and a moral concern. Free Soilers wanted the land for their own purposes. Expansion of slave states would mean expansion of a Senate group that would be in favor of reducing taxes and tariffs, an issue that almost caused a civil war to happen 40 years prior.

On the other hand, if something’s morally repugnant it should be called out as such.