I’ve been thinking of potential measures that corporate-controlled authoritarian governments could use against any kind of left-wing information or organizing, and it seems like an obvious one is a sudden, widespread crackdown on left-wing content. In practice, social media companies would collude with the government to:
- Wipe out all left-wing social media profiles and ban left-wing rhetoric under the justification that it is “terrorism-related content”.
- Block access to thousands of left-wing sites at once and de-list them from search engines
- Update content moderation algorithms to prevent more of this content from being published or recommended
- Do all of these on the same day to cause the most disorientation and fear
- Continually go after the hosts of the niche left-wing news and communication channels that still remain, such as small websites, fediverse instances, and encrypted communication channels. Throw their operators in prison and make examples out of them
In effect, due to the centralized nature of social media and news, the online left could instantly be scattered through the collusion of just a few large corporations.
It would:
- Galvanize the populist right-wing base
- Stoke feelings of fear, isolation, and hopelessness among the opposition, deterring action
- Weaken the left’s ability to organize
- Make it harder for people to learn about real left-wing ideas and stances
Why wouldn’t they take that opportunity?
The bulk of online left-wing activity could instantly be wiped out in a single day. Why am I not hearing more people talking about that? Why do so many left-leaning people think sites like BlueSky will save them? Do they really think they are resisting by using centralized social media platforms? The corporatocracy has complete control over all of the infrastructure…
In my opinion, every influencer on the left should be screaming from the rooftops every single day that the most productive thing you can be doing is talking to people, building connections, and organizing in the real world, because our platform on the Internet could vanish instantaneously.
Anyway, I hope I’m wrong, but it feels like something that could easily happen. What are your thoughts?
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.