I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.

Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.

Realistically either a federal court needs to step in or some sort of legislation needs to be passed/updated regarding speech on the internet. A handful of private companies control a huge amount of public communication on the internet. Essentially the internet is the “modern town square” and if you get deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, your ability to communicate is massively impacted. Unless you’re already an established name by the time you get deplatformed (Like Trump or Alex Jones), being deplatformed basically makes it impossible to have a voice online.

People don’t care for now because the only people being deplatformed are “right wing extremists” but as time passes the definition for what is and isn’t acceptable on major sites will keep getting more and more strict. Even in the beginning it was a pretty grey area where these private companies were removing “misinformation” and citing government entities as the “correct” source. And shortly after the Biden administration became known to work directly with companies like Facebook to remove what they consider harmful information. At what point do we cross the line from “private companies doing what they want” to “the government directing private companies to remove information that hurts them”? For all the people who support these companies censoring topics under the direction of the Biden administration, how will you feel when the next Republican administration does it?

I unfortunately don’t see a way this ends that benefits Americans. Both parties have shown that they want to control speech/information on the internet, since 2019 it’s not only become tolerated, but actually expected. And for the first time ever a majority of Americans support the US government restricting speech online. That scares the shit out of me personally. Congress isn’t going to do shit, the FCC isn’t gonna do shit, and the supreme court certainly isn’t gonna do shit. I don’t want to imagine how the internet is gonna look in 10 years.

We should have never allowed it to get to this point. The endless mergers of tech and media companies that resulted in a handful of companies effectively controlling the internet should have caused riots in the streets. The second companies started “fact checking” posts and removing what they consider false information should have set off tons of alarm bells. And the second the US government started directing tech companies toward posts they needed to take down there should have been riots in the streets. But nobody seems to care because we’re all too busy defending powerful corporations and an authoritarian government because apparently authoritarianism isn’t bad when it only hurts your political opponents.

In 2020-2021 the line “they’re a private company and can choose what speech they host on their platform” was thrown around a lot to defend pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and loads of other social media sites.

Disney is adored by many for “standing up to DeSantis” and doing lots of inclusiveness pandering in their media. People seem to instantly forget that a corporation is literally evil the second some people get wound up over a black mermaid.

A really old meme would be the anti-capitalist who owns an iPhone and $2000 MacBook.

Lots of internet techies are excited about Microsoft acquiring Activision just because it means new video games will hit PC and Xbox quicker.

Speaking of Microsoft, while Bill Gates has become more controversial in recent years, he still has lots of people who love him for his philanthropy while nicely glossing over some of the sketchy stuff he’s done like his association with Jeffery Epstein and how he has recently become the largest landowner in the US.

I’d say the defending of corporate censorship and defending giant corporations that support certain social issues would be the two most glaring offenders.

This place is lame because it’s somehow even more obsessed with politics than Reddit. It’s draining to go to a social media site and constantly be subjected to negative headlines.

Based on two comments I made do you truly think I’m “biased toward the Republican side” or are you just assuming that because you automatically assume anyone who disagrees with Democrats on certain issues is a Republican sympathizer?

/r/antiwork, /r/murderedbyAOC, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/politicalhumor, /r/blackpeopletwitter, etc. I could go on.

What’s the biggest “right wing echo chamber” on Reddit? /r/conservative has just barely over 1M subscribers, which puts it at a fraction of the size of those subs mentioned above.

You can’t actually be serious can you?

Reddit back in the early 2010s was infamous for worshipping Ron Paul. In the early and mid-2010s there were literally subreddits dedicated to racism. It was controversial in the 2010s to ban or censor anything, meanwhile today all of the big subreddits are run by a handful of mods who will ban anyone who says something they don’t like, or even ban people automatically if they comment in a sub they don’t like.

If you think Reddit is somehow more right-leaning today than in the 2010s, I think that might just mean that you became far more left-leaning since then and everything else looks right-leaning in comparison.

Yeah but Reddit admins are more than happy to remove mods if they don’t like them.

Is there really anything to say there that everyone in this comment thread would be surprised by?

Republicans care too much about culture war BS

Republicans are blatantly wrong on the issue of abortion, and it’s actually baffling that they continue to oppose abortion even though it’s going to cost them elections

Environment. Need I say more?

Republicans are guilty of supporting giant corporations and serving corporate interests just as much as democrats. The only reason I don’t say they’re more guilty than Democrats is because companies that I consider to be some of the most monopolistic and controlling are tech and media companies that get much more support from democrats. I consider it a tie until one party either blocks a corporate merger or breaks up a monopoly.

I touched on Democrats being creepily authoritarian regarding speech, but of course Republicans are just as eager to censor when they have the opportunity as well.

I could go on, but these are the glaring issues I can think of that immediately come to mind.

I always find it funny (albeit in a depressing way) when people on the left act like anything short of totally open borders is white supremacy.

Wanna talk about ethnostates? Check out the demographics and immigration policies for countries like Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Wanna talk about racism? Ask the average naturalized immigrant how they feel about illegal immigration.

Supporting more secured borders isn’t racist. The reality is that the American government should prioritize the interests of its own citizens before prioritizing the interests of people from other countries. It drives me up the walls to see how much support our government provides to refugees when meanwhile our own cities are struggling, most often in predominately black areas. Yes it’s a slight false dichotomy to act like we can’t support refugees while also improving our inner cities, but the reality is that we usually fail to do both as they’re often competing interests.

Is it really “supporting a white ethnostate” to say I’d rather have our country let in more immigrants with college degrees or at least a willingness to work over a bunch of people who have zero desire to integrate or even work.

“Progress” doesn’t mean trying to increase the population of our cities and diversity as much as possible even if it means bringing in millions of people who will rely on the government to survive, refuse to integrate into American society, and are the literal opposite of progressive. “Progress” means working to improve the lives of the people we have already living here, regardless of their ethnic background. And currently our immigration policy isn’t accomplishing that.

Centrism is just being able to acknowledge that both parties have flaws. If you can’t find any issues with the party you support, that means that you got your political views from someone else instead of developing them yourself.

People on a left-leaning site don’t wanna hear it, but US Democrats aren’t perfect. Their policy on immigration is not sustainable. A de facto open border policy for refugees and people who cross illegally while people with college degrees can’t even get a work visa is absurd. As a nation we are not obligated to help others when many of our own citizens are struggling. Biden’s student debt relief plan would have caused tuition prices to increase at an even faster rate than before and guaranteed further debt relief executive orders would be required in the future. Plus it set an insane precedent that the president could authorize billions in spending without any congressional oversight. Democrats were frightengly authoritarian during COVID with stuff like vaccine mandates and online censorship. Things were labelled as “misinformation” and later accepted to be the truth… repeatedly, and people simply didn’t care. One day you could get banned from every social media site for saying COVID may have come from a lab, and the next day it was perfectly plausible. That stuff would have been unthinkable prior to 2020 and it’s just apparently normal today.

And then there is the stuff where they’re just hypocritical or simply providing lip service. Biden could remove marijuana’s schedule 1 classification today with an executive order, but he won’t. Instead his administion argued in court that marijuana users cannot be trusted owning firearms and the ATF is right to prohibit them from buying guns. Speaking of guns, Biden also signed an executive order declaring pistol braces to be stocks after years of the ATF saying they weren’t stocks, making millions of gun owners into felons, many who didn’t even know about the reclassification. A piece of plastic that was legal one day is now 10 years in federal prison. Democrats are guilty of putting corporate interests before individual interests, much like republicans. Democrats love to talk about how much they care about the environment and climate change, but would sooner pass a law saying people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees than dare invest money into nuclear power or stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

You don’t have to agree with everything I said here. But if you can’t find anything to criticize about your preferred party, or at least acknowledge that these are valid criticisms even if you disagree with them, you are part of the problem.

“Centrists” gets tons of hate online that’s unwarranted IMO. “Centrism” is just a label people like to put on independent voters because mocking them by acting like their political position can be summed up as “Democrats have some good points, but the Nazis do too” is an easy way to dismiss them, when the reality is that most centrists are voters who get no representation since we have a broken-ass two-party system. Admitting that the two-party system is bad doesn’t benefit you if you support one of those two parties. So here we are.

And the end result is that every site is an echo chamber.

The state of the internet in 2023 is more or less, “Do you want the left-wing circlejerk or the right-wing circlejerk?” And if you want a place where people are allowed to express their views even if it disagrees with the majority opinion of the site, that no longer exists.

I’m sure it must be great if you identify as left or right, but it sure as hell sucks shit if you don’t align completely with either side.

You know your political views are truly independent when both the left and right accuse you of siding with the enemy.

Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”

Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.

“Extremely” doesn’t go far enough to accurately describe that cesspool

Audiophiles out here in denial of the fact that 99% of music is played via Bluetooth.

I don’t care if my streamed music isn’t the absolute best quality when I’m listening on AirPods or in my car.

Software subscriptions are what really bums me out. Back in the day you could just buy your software and have it forever. Now Microsoft Office is a subscription, Adobe Photoshop is a subscription, and so much more. Nothing pisses me off more than when I install a basic app on my phone and find out it’s actually a subscription app.

Literally the only major software I can think of right now that isn’t subscription based or insanely expensive is Apple’s Final Cut Pro at $300.

Google went public in 2004. They’ve always been greedy scumbags. It’s just more apparent now since they are constantly looking for new ways to extract money from their customers.

Yeah I love Youtube Premium on the family plan. People on the internet act like there’s no benefit to it as long as Adblock and Youtube Vanced exist. Meanwhile I have an iPhone, smart TVs, and my whole family does too. My nieces and nephews don’t have to get bombarded with ads, and that’s well worth it to me. But the way they silently jacked the price up $5 per month was a total dick move that I’m not happy about. If they keep pulling this shit, it’s only a matter of time before I find another solution.

And guess what, if we have universal healthcare without checks and balances, hospitals will just create more middle management positions to drive up costs.

Healthcare in the US is a disaster right now, but unfortunately just having the government say they’ll foot the bill will make things worse. The bloat in the healthcare industry (as well as pharmaceutical and medical device industries) needs to be combated too.