..The process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.
YouTube was the most important platform for reaching The Youth and also uniquely compatible with monetization, allowing independent political/intellectual entrepreneurs to make a career.
The most important platform to be closed off 2017-2019 was YouTube. Before 2017, YouTube was a very open platform, with easy monetization and almost no moderation of legal content. By the end of 2019, thoughtcrime (anything to the right of Ben Shapiro) was thoroughly purged.
In March 2017, several news organizations (The Times of London, the Guardian, WSJ) published coordinated articles about ads appearing next to "problematic" content on YouTube. This led to the British government summoning Google to explain and an advertiser boycott.
[as an aside, no one sane believes that an ad appearing next to a YouTube video implies the company behind that ad endorses or knows about the content of the video; this was 100% astroturf. No one knew or complained until the news articles hit]
Google then began restricting ads/monetization to large accounts that had been manually reviewed, and greatly expanded the scope of its hate speech policy (for instance, banning insults "associated with marginalization" - no points for guessing who defines that).
YouTube participated in the August 2018 deplatforming of Alex Jones (along with Apple, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Vimeo, and Twitter), permanently banning from the site. Jones' deplatforming was the start of a slippery slope.
YouTube expanded to more than 10,000 moderators in 2018. More than 90% of removed videos were seen by fewer than ten people.
Anonymoose · 2026-04-16 01:03 [#3353][report] In August 2018, YouTube also began banning state-sponsored content from Russia and Iran. This is less significant from a freedom-of-thought perspective, but I think sets a hard "no later than" date by which US intelligence agencies were getting involved.
In January 2019, Google began algorithmically suppressing "borderline content" meaning content that did not violate their guidelines but they judged could be harmful. Unlike bans, algorithmic suppression is silent and almost impossible to prove or fight.
By Dec 2018, Google was removing millions of videos per quarter, though mostly being spam or scams (which I think is justified, otherwise the site is unusable). But around 1% were for political reasons, and this number exploded in 2019 when moderation policy was changed.
Some of this zeal (more than 58M videos removed in Q3 2018) was to "demonstrate progress in suppressing problem content" to "government officials and interest groups [read: astroturfed NGOs]" who were (and are - see the UK's OSA) keen to control what is on YouTube.
In June 2019, YouTube demonetized and then banned Steven Crowder for calling a Vox journalist an "anchor baby" and a "lisping queer", which they acknowledged did not violate their policies [also note the Daily Beast calling insults "gay bashing," which they are not].
Anonymoose · 2026-04-16 01:03 [#3354][report] In Q2 2019, Google began "prohibiting videos alleging group superiority" [no prizes for guessing for which groups this was enforced] and as a consequence ramped up suspensions fivefold, banning more than 17,000 channels and deleting more than 100,00 videos and 500M comments.
Google eventually began banning "malicious insults based on protected attributes" [no points for guessing which attributes were protected or what counted as an insult] in December 2019.
In 2016, there was a thriving alt-center/"anti-woke"/anti-feminist ecosystem on YouTube, often connected to the New Atheists. By 2019, almost every major creator was banned, demonetized, or became leftist to survive, replaced by anarchist/Communist "Breadtube."
Since The Youth are illiterate troglodytes, video content served by algorithmic feed is their major source of information, and until TikTok (which has similar policies), YouTube was by far the largest source of this (by orders of magnitude).
As such, the purging of anti-woke/anti-feminists from YouTube killed any sort of semi-popular intellectual opposition to the Great Awokening under 30. The only site more emblematic of the annihilation of open internet discourse 2017-2019 might be Reddit.
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>>12562 Reddit was known for its "anything goes" speech policy in 2015, and was the hub for text-based debate between normal people on opposing sides of issues. Turned into a leftist echo-chamber to spite r/TheDonald.
In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment, and involuntary or underage pornography. By 2020, Reddit had purged political dissent from the site.
Much of Reddit's shift was motivated by one thing: that r/The_Donald, the hub of internet Trump support, could consistently reach and dominate the front page. Reddit repeatedly changed their algorithm and policies specifically to suppress r/The_Donald before banning it.
The first major crack in Reddit's freedom of speech stance was in 2016, when the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, was caught personally editing user's posts on r/The_Donald. He then changed Reddit's policy to exclude r/The_Donald from the r/popular Reddit homepage.
After Unite the Right in Charlottesville (October 2017), Reddit announced an expanded content policy against hate speech and banned around 20 subreddits.
Anonymoose · 2026-04-16 01:13 [#3356][report] >>12565 In March 2018, Reddit began banning the (legal) sale of guns or prostitution in response to the Parkland mass shooting. 1a.png
In September 2018, Reddit revamped their quarantine system (subreddits became invisible to non-members, killing growth) and began quarantining dozens of subs, including popular ones such as r/TheRedPill, for being "controversial" [ie, some activist wrote an article].
Also in September, Reddit changed its harassment policy from requiring fear for real-world safety to simply "anything that works to shut someone out of the conversation through intimidation or abuse," a much laxer standard. This led to dozens more subs getting purged.
In January 2019, many subreddits were banned for "anti-Muslim content" after the Christchurch shooting, including r/Gore and r/cringeanarchy, neither of which were political. 5a.jpg
r/The_Donald, the hub of Trump support on the Internet with 754,000 subscribers, was quarantined in June 2019, as was r/frenworld (for using pepe the frog memes as coded antisemitic messaging). r/The_Donald was banned for good in 2020, along with more than 2000 other subs.
In numbers: in 2019 Reddit quarantined 256 subs, banned 21,900 subs, suspended 55,994 accounts for policy (as opposed to eg spam) violations, and removed 222,000 pieces of content for policy violations. Moderators removed 84.1 million pieces of content.
One of the more difficult things to find concrete information on was the role of power mods. By 2020 six volunteer moderators had autocratic control over 118 of the top 500 subs; these individuals tend to be leftist and plausibly more powerful than the actual site.
In 2015, Redditors were almost universally hostile to the idea of censorship or banning "hate speech." By 2018, a significant minority were in favor. By 2020, most dissenters having been banned from the site, a majority were in favor.
Today, Reddit is notorious for its doctrinaire leftism, but it used to be a very ideologically heterogenous site and the main discussion forum between different groups on the Internet. Nothing has successfully replaced 2016 Reddit for actual popular debate.
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reon2 · 2026-04-16 01:17 [#3358][report] >>12562 Amazon, with its dominance of the e-book and e-commerce markets, played a similar political commissar role for aspiring authors and merch sellers. And like other major tech giants, had little content policy beyond "no illegal content, spam or scams/fraud" in 2015 and by 2020 had a well developed censorship infrastructure for both the web store and AWS.
Amazon is particularly important for two reasons: (1) AWS making it, like Google Search, a major Internet chokepoint and (2) 50% book and 80% e-book market share; Amazon banning a book is the closest a non-classified book can really come to being banned in the US.
The first cracks in Amazon's neutrality appeared in June 2015, when a media blitz and political pressure campaign (sparked by Dylan Roof) led to Amazon removing all Confederate flag (a completely normal American symbol) merchandise from the site. 1.png
By August 2018, Amazon was banning "items that Amazon deems offensive," in this case Nazi-themed merchandise. Note the direct intervention of a Democratic lawmaker (Keith Ellison) - this was not a purely private endeavor. 2.png
Again in response to Congress, Amazon removed Proud Boys, a civic nationalist patriotic group that semi-regularly fought antifa, memorabilia in 2018 (they would later do the same to QAnon). Needless to say, antifa merch was not pulled. 3.png
After a threatening letter from nine Democratic lawmakers in 2019, Amazon banned most gun accessories, parts, and ammunition from the site, including basic things like slings and rails. 4.png
By 2019, Amazon was accustomed to taking listings down in response to news articles [not "online outrage", important distinction], such as innocuous (really) Auschwitz Christmas ornaments (it was part of a series of ornaments themed around Polish cities). 5.png
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Anonymoose2 · 2026-04-16 01:20 [#3359][report] >>12568 Mein Kampf was removed in 2020. Needless to say "Quotations from Chairman Mao" and "The Wretched of the Earth" were not. 1a.png
By 2021, even fairly academic and tame criticism of the transgender movement [which barely existed 10 years prior], "When Harry Became Sally" could be banned from Amazon and thus cut off from any mass audience. 2a.png
Amazon started going after non-illegal (they kicked wikileaks off in 2010 because wikileaks was illegal) sites using AWS in 2019, by threatening another host provider, Epik, for providing services to 8Chan (which was not hosted on AWS directly). 3a.jpg 4a.png
They did the same with Gab, another right-wing Twitter alternative (which was also banned by Microsoft Azure). 5a.png
Anonymoose2 · 2026-04-16 01:22 [#3360][report] >>12569 Amazon Web Services was politicized dramatically in 2021 when it kicked Parler, an alternative to Twitter that gained popularity when Trump was banned, from the platform, destroying the app (which was simultaneously banned by both Apple and Google from their app stores). 1b.jpg
Not being a social media site, Amazon's moderation/content removal/censorship apparatus is much less noticeable than YouTube or Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, but it was built around the same time (2015-2019) and performed (and performs) similar functions. I should mention that I have not touched COVID/lockdown related removals. Subjectively, one of the big differences between Amazon and Google/YouTube/Reddit was the importance of US Congress; direct threats from Democratic lawmakers precipitated several major steps on the censorship ladder, whereas the EU and UK were more important for the others.
Twitter, which dominated among cultural elites (journos, academics, politicians) went from "the free speech wing of the free speech party" to an extension of a partisan FBI with many different tiers of algorithmic manipulation for disfavored stories. In 2015, Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party" according to CEO Jack Dorsey, even avoiding collaboration with the NSA (unlike Google, Facebook). By 2019 it was one of the most censored, monitored, and controlled social media networks in the world. 1.png
YouTube was the biggest and most monetizable platform, Reddit the most important discussion forum, Amazon needed for authors and websites, and Google Search (We will touch on this later) the only way to surface niche info sources. Twitter mattered as the social network of the intelligentsia.
In 2015, Twitter under Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde began reinterpreting their existing rules much more broadly and banned hate speech, to "keep Twitter safe." Chuck Johnson was banned for tweeting that would "take out" (attack digitally, not murder) a BLM activist. 2.png 3.png
Twitter's informal stance had already started changing, but the big formal changes to the rules began in 2016, when it no longer promised not to censor user content that didn't break the rules ("limited circumstances described below"). 4.png
In February 2016, Twitter established its (in)famous "Trust and Safety" council, a body which networked censorship/moderation/activist expertise around the world to inform Twitter policy. 5.png
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reon3 · 2026-04-16 01:31 [#3362][report] >>12571 In 2017, Twitter formally moved against "hate symbols" and "unwanted sexual advances." The blue check aristocracy began to take form too, with Rose McGowan's followers impelling this change (on her behalf) after she was temporarily locked for posting someone's private number. 1a.jpg
In 2018, Twitter banned "misgendering" transsexuals, and laid out which groups got special protection ("women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, and marginalized and historically underrepresented communities"). 2a.png
Twitter also began shadowbanning prominent Republican politicians in 2018, though they later claimed this was a bug and backtracked when Republicans attacked them for it. 3a.png
High profile bans included Milo Yiannopoulos (338,000 followers, July 2016), major Trump advisor Roger Stone (October 2017), Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys (August 2018), Alex Jones (coordinated with other platforms, Sept 2018), Laura Loomer (265,000 followers, Nov 2018). 4a.png 5a.png
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Anonymoose3 · 2026-04-16 01:32 [#3363][report] >>12573 In the first half of 2018, Twitter actioned 250,806 accounts for hateful conduct. This increased by 54% by the second half of 2019. 1b.png 2b.png
Some revelations from Elon's Twitter files: 1) The FBI had a dedicated task force of 80 agents and a one-way communication channel called teleporter to flag posts, even joke posts from tiny accounts 3b.png
2) All of the conspiracies about shadowbans were totally vindicated; Twitter had separate lists for Trends blacklists, Search blacklists, and "Do Not Amplify" (which included Charlie Kirk), with multiple levels of visibility filtering and internal bodies to administer them 4b.png
I have deliberately avoided getting into the 2020-2022 intensification of censorship/narrative control (eg putting notes on Trump's posts and banning him, Hunter Biden's laptop, everything related to COVID, lab leak, and the lockdowns).
Anonymoose3 · 2026-04-16 01:39 [#3364][report] >>12562 Facebook's closure was closely linked to German, EU, and British pressure after it was (mostly wrongly) blamed for opposition to the 2015 migrant crisis and Brexit. Significant because Facebook allowed the Internet to reach the Great Boomer Voter Mass.
The most interesting thing in Facebook's evolution from mostly-free (albeit without pseudonymity) platform to aggressively controlled between 2015 and 2020 is how involved European governments were in the process (thread).
The most important thing about Facebook is that it can be used to reach the great mass of Gen X and Boomer adults who are not Internet natives and comprise most swing voters. Dark Facebook Manipulation from Russia and Vote Leave was blamed for both Trump 2016 and Brexit.
These two events provoked an avalanche of books, news articles, government reports, NGOs, and hearings (including in 2018 in the US Senate) about how Facebook microtargeting would end democracy. Example: 1.png
Facebook did not change their formal policies as much as Twitter/Reddit/YouTube, transformed how the platform surfaced and moderated political content. Facebook began reporting their "hate speech" moderation metrics in Q4 2017; in three years it was nearly erased from the site. 2.jpg
The amount of content actioned for hate speech steadily rose 2017-2020, exploding to more than 22 million posts in Q2 2020 when the lockdowns (which intensified Internet closure across all platforms) began. 3.jpg
Facebook hired an additional 3000 moderators in 2017. 4.png
In 2017, Facebook began flagging 'misinformation'; by 2019 this had been outsourced to third party fact-checkers (who, of course, were not ideologically neutral), who gained the ability to flag, deboost, and eventually remove posts at will. 5.png <second attachment in next post>
The German government's German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) imposed large fines for illegal (incl political) content. Since there were no fines for over-enforcement, this encouraged Facebook to aggressively censor. Officially-recognized journalists were exempt. 2a.jpg 3a.jpg
One of the privileges of the Fourth Estate of our present ancien regime is freedom of speech - the ability to avoid social media censorship.
As with YouTube, the British government was extremely important in the closure of Facebook. The Brexit referendum was blamed on a (hallucinated) microtargeting narrative (Cambridge Analytica), which was then used to justify a then-novel suite of legal speech controls. 4a.png 5a.png
Dominic Cummings, who ran Vote Leave and wrote down what he was doing and how he did it both before and after the referendum, pointed out that this "dark adverts" narrative is nonsense from journos who don't understand A/B testing or focus groups are. https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/18/on-the-referendum-24h-facebook-data-science-technology-elections-and-transparency/
An admin for one of the biggest right-wing Facebook groups had a DM session with his impressions/experience with Facebook moderation and censorship. RW Facebook was big in 2016/17. 1.png
The big crackdown began in summer 2017; it did not take the form of bans for hate speech but rather all publicly-known admin accounts getting suspended for no reason, leading to the pages disappearing. 2.png
This included device bans which permanently destroyed most of the pages. 3.png
The admin purges with no justification were more effective than the page deletions, in part because normie conservatives rallied against censorship but couldn't really grasp or understand the implications of extremely opaque account removals. 4.png
The interesting thing is that the non-public admins did not get taken down, even though they would've been easily visible from inside Facebook, which implies that the crackdown was using lists of accounts compiled by outside groups (probably academics). 5.png <second attachment in next post>
He pointed me to this sophisticated and accurate network analysis from German academia as an example of what the outside sources behind the crackdown could possibly have been. 2a.jpg
In addition to the mass account banning, Facebook also used shadowbanning, cutting my source's reach by over 99%. According to him, both the shadowbans and account purges stopped the instant Biden was inaugurated in 2021, though he no longer talks about politics. 3a.png
On the state of the shadowbans. A page with >40K followers and no official restrictions getting literally 1-2 engagements per post, with this suddenly changing post-Biden's inauguration. 4a.jpg 5a.png <second attachment in next post>
Facebook had several major advantages over RW X/Twitter: it was more personal, slower-paced and hence more careful and less sloppy, had better group functions (and hence more privacy) and better vetting. They heyday of RW Facebook lasted ~1-1.5 years. 2b.png
My source believes the suppression of RW Facebook, with its relatively higher standards, paved the way for the current degenerate grifter dominance on the e-Right, as the purges destroyed any sort of internal group hygiene/emergent standards. 3b.png
Author's view on the state of e-right discourse: much of it is bad because even the more intellectually-minded tend to have little general knowledge and base everything off a small number of books (I concur, people should read more mainstream history for a decent fact base). 4b.png
In my source's judgement: Facebook's censorship campaign came from govt (esp EU)/NGO/academic pressure, not antifa and not within Facebook itself either (hence missing private admins). All vanished as soon as Biden was in office. 5b.png
Anonymoose3 · 2026-04-16 01:58 [#3369][report] >>12580 Source confirms my belief that the chilling effect of censorship (though unmeasurable) is much bigger than the direct effect. 1c.png 2c.png
This happened right *before* Unite The Right/Charlottesville, which meant that my source and some of his Facebook friends were unable to warn against attendance. 3c.png
Anonymoose5 · 2026-04-16 02:10 [#3370][report] >>12562 Apple's role was more through intimidation/chilling effects than direct censorship; there were only a few removals but given Apple mobile dominance they had a big effect.
From 2016 to 2023, Apple's App Store, half the mobile duopoly, went from a curated software marketplace to one of the most important content control systems on Earth. In June 2016, Apple completely reorganized their App Store Review Guidelines into five pillars: Safety, Performance, Business, Design, and Legal. 1.png
Most of Apple's big decisions were not policy ones but specific removals that had a chilling effect on future discourse. In Aug 2018, Apple removed 5/6 Alex Jones podcasts for hate speech. This was done jointly with similar actions from Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. 2.jpg
One demonstration of Apple's market power and the effect of their content control apparatus was their treatment of Tumblr. Apple removed Tumblr from the app store in 2018 over CSAM, which forced Tumblr to ban all NSFW content, which led to a 33% drop in users. 3.png
Apple also removed all vaping-related apps from their store Nov 2019. 4.png
Apple was one of the biggest players (along with Amazon and Google) in the destruction of Twitter alternative Parler in 2021 (banning them from the app store), explicitly because Parler's moderation practices were not to their liking. 5.png
Gab, another Twitter alternative, was never granted app store access in the first place, first being rejected in Dec 2016. 1a.png
Apple has been extremely accommodating with the Chinese government's demands for data access and content control, banning VPN apps in China in 2017 and giving the Chinese government unrestricted access to Chinese user's iCloud data. 2a.jpg 3a.jpg
Apple also banned an app used by Hong Kong protestors in 2019 and removed the Taiwanese flag emoji at the CCP's request. Approximately 3200 apps are missing from the Chinese app store, roughly 1/3 of which are for political reasons. 4a.jpg 5a.jpg <third attachment in next message>
Apple also did things like limit airdropping in China during the anti-lockdown protests in 2022 and banning Bible and Quran apps in China. 1b.jpg
In the ~1989-2008 US debate wrt China, China bulls like Bill Clinton claimed that market access would make Chinese values more like the US, but the reverse happened, because the PRC learned to use its market power and supplier monopoly to coerce Western entities.
Tim Cook, to the ADL: "our values drive our curation systems" and "tech companies must stand by their values and remove content that promotes hate and white supremacy." 2b.jpg
Anonycow6 · 2026-04-16 02:17 [#3373][report] >>12562 You might say "it's OK, it's the Internet, even if you're kicked off the major platforms you can make your own website/forum and people can find you"... except Google also changed their search algorithm to avoid non-mainstream sites and sources. Try finding Cyberix on Google right now.
It is stunning how quickly the Internet was closed off 2017-2023. Perhaps most importantly, Google began politicizing search results in April 2017 with "Project Owl," which sought to suppress "problematic searches" [their term, not mine]. 1.png
To accomplish this, Google began removing "problematic" autocomplete selections. Since then, there have been a number of cases of Google's autocomplete bias getting so heavy-handed it went viral on other platforms, but the thumb on the scale is usually invisible. 2.png
Google also began manual rating/curation of their "featured snippets" answers. 3.png
Google also began boosting, in their own words, "authoritative" content in search results. This meant more mainstream news articles, Wikipedia, government pages, Reddit, and NGO reports, and fewer blogs, forums, and independent writing that might be a better match. 4.jpg
Project Owl was one of the prototypes for a wave of similar measures at other platforms. The playbook looked something like (1) find something "problematic" [eg Holocaust denial] on platform that no one would associate with the company itself [in this case of Google, less than 0.25% of results] (2) AstroTurf media campaign "criticizing" the company (sometimes with ad boycott thrown in) (3) sympathetic prog insiders at company work to close down platform, usually using mainstream media or disinformation NGOs as epistemic authorities (and sometimes three letter agencies). 5.png
This is separate from YouTube, Gmail, or more recently Gemini, all of which have had similar campaigns. Google is probably the most powerful company in the world.
..and if you can survive getting booted off every major platform and Google search, your cloud providers/payment processors/DDoS protection/ISPs/domain registrars might coordinate to nuke you off the Internet anyways.
Deplatforming of websites time! This is when private web infrastructure actors (cloud providers, payment processors, DNS providers, certificate authorities, DDoS protectors) coordinate to purge websites. Several layers of the web stack are oligopolies, so this can happen sans explicit coordination.
The first major case of infrastructure-level deplatforming was WikiLeaks in 2010, for releasing classified information obtained illegally (US diplomatic cables), referred to as "Cablegate," by AWS, EveryDNS, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America. 1.jpg
The attacks on WikiLeaks were not ideological ones (they were committing actual crimes as a website), but the tactics (both deplatforming and extremely bogus sex "scandals" like sending love letters to a 19 year old), presaged later efforts during the Great Awokening.
The first major ideological deplatforming was that of the Daily Stormer in 2017. First GoDaddy, then Google Domains, then several different countries ((.ru), (.al),(.at)(.is)(.cat)) booted them off of their domain. Then Sendgrid and Zoho terminated email and SaaS services. 2.png 3.png
The coup de grace was Cloudflare terminating DDoS protections, which effectively terminated the site. The entire deplatforming process took four days (GoDaddy terminated their domain Aug 13, Cloudflare acted on Aug 16). 4.jpg
Unlike WikiLeaks, the Daily Stormer was not doing anything illegal. But they were an explicitly Neo-Nazi website and so attracted little defense, and none at all from lawmakers. Unsurprisingly, then, this tactic quickly escalated to more benign sites.
Gab is a Twitter alternative. It is a right-wing site, but more BlueSky than Daily Stormer. In Oct 2017, GoDaddy stopped registering the domain, Joyent, their hosting provider, terminated them, PayPal and Stripe blocked payments, and BackBlaze terminated cloud storage. 5.png
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Anonycow6 · 2026-04-16 02:23 [#3375][report] >>12587 8Chan, an unmoderated 4Chan alternative, was deplatformed in 2019, first by Cloudflare, then by a sequence of small cloud providers (8Chan never used AWS/Azure/Google), (Alibaba Cloud, Zare UK, Tucows). Their domain registrar, Epik, was then itself deplatformed by Voxility. 1a.jpg
Parler, like Gab, was a Twitter alternative, but where Gab primarily appealed to deplatformed alt-righters (but again, was and is a social media site), Parler had a much more normie MAGA userbase. Parler was deplatformed in 2021. 2a.jpg
Parler was first banned from Google and Apple's app stores (combined, near monopoly on mobile), then its cloud provider (AWS), then payment processors (Stripe, American express), and SaaS providers (Slack, Okta, and Zendesk). 3a.png
Parler tried to get a temporary restraining order on antitrust grounds (alleging that Twitter was conspiring with Amazon to crush a competitor), but was rejected by federal judge Barbara Rothstein. 4a.png
This effectively destroyed the site; Parler was able to restore service eventually but lost 96% of its user base.
At this point, deplatforming was so normalized that Kiwi Farms, a random small forum, was deplatformed in 2022 for hosting threats against trans streamer Keffals. First by Cloudflare, then by a smaller anti-DDoS site (DDoS Guard). 5a.png
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Anonycow6 · 2026-04-16 02:25 [#3376][report] >>12588 The biggest escalation in the Kiwi Farms (again, random forum, not an important or major site) deplatforming, was that for the first time a Tier 1 internet service provider (ISP), Hurricane Electric, joined the deplatforming. 1b.png
In several of these cases (Daily Stormer, Gab, Kiwi Farms), the sites were/are run by very technically skilled individuals who could replace the deplatformed services themselves (eg Kiwi Farms' Joshua Moon built his own CloudFlare alternative), but their reach was still gone. (And of course, "you need to be personally capable of replacing the entire Internet and SaaS tech stack by yourself to operate" will kill almost all sites).
Even the "domain registar of last resort," Epik, which just provided domain registration to other sites, was itself destroyed when Anonymous hackers hacked it in 2021 and leaked 15M email addresses, leading the owner to sell it and the new owners to cease providing services. 2b.png
First, Neo-Nazi websites got deplatformed, then social media sites with heavily alt-right userbases, then unmoderated image boards, then sites catering to normie MAGA, then random forums. This worked to disarm opposition; no Senator was going to stand up for the Daily Stormer.
A common retort to people complaining of censorship is "make your own [Facebook/Reddit/YouTube etc]". But if you do that, can you also replace domain registration, payment processing, cloud hosting, DDoS protection, app store access, SaaS services, and even your ISP by yourself?
Some troglodytes will say mass purges of websites from the Internet by PRIVATE infrastructure providers are OK. These people are natural slaves with zero appreciation for freedom of speech/expression/association who love the idea of a loophole around the First Amendment.
reon7 · 2026-04-16 02:31 [#3377][report] >>12562 I don't think it matters, but our political vocabulary is much better at fighting formal state tyranny than decentralized networks controlling a handful of nominally private chokepoints, so it's worth pointing out 5eyes was probably involved.
Consider the Anglosphere Intelligence's role in the 2015-2023 closure of the Internet. Not a ton of evidence on the topic (obviously), so this part isn't super dense. There was a huge surge in tech hiring of ex-FBI employees in 2018. 1.png
It is not inherently suspicious that ex-spooks go to Silicon Valley companies; many have expertise in cybersecurity and related fields. What IS suspicious is that so many flock to the content control/moderation roles (Trust and Safety etc). 2.png
For example, you have Meta product policy managers for disinformation (ex-CIA) and senior managers of Trust & Safety at Google (also ex-CIA). 3.png
One Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for MENA was simultaneously a psyop specialist for the British army. 4.jpg
The Twitter Files revealed that both the CIA and FBI regularly met with Twitter, and there were so many ex-FBI agents at the firm that they had their own slack channel. FITF meetings, which were supposed to be about foreign influence, usually focused on "domestic intelligence." 4.png <second attachment in next post> <third attachment in next post>
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I AM NUMBER SEVEN YES I AM THE NUMBER SEVEN · 2026-04-16 02:32 [#3378][report] >>12590
Not too much to say. Certainly tech and intelligence are fairly closely bound and have been since before the closure of the Internet (NLT the late Obama era - note 2016 is cut off, chart should end in 2015 to compare full years to full years).
The question is not "to what extent is intelligence involved with tech" (the answer is obviously, "a lot"), but to what extent have they used this to influence domestic politics (the answer is "not zero," but hard to tell how much).
On top of covert involvement, many Western governments participated directly and formally with wide-ranging moderation and censorship laws and "guidelines," especially Germany, Britain, the EU, and Australia.
Germany's 2017 NetzDG act, which forced large platforms to hire thousands of moderators or potentially face huge fines for hosting illegal content even outside of Germany, was the first major law. 1.png
This German law served as the template for similar laws in other authoritarian despotisms, such as Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and India. 2.jpg
The EU has also exercised informal pressure, imposing a "Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online" on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft in 2016. 3.png
This escalated in 2020 to law with the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposed fines of up to 6% of global revenue for illegal content and demanded certain EU-based orgs (mostly NGOs and official journalists) get "trusted flagger" status, meaning their reports are prioritized. 4.jpg 5.png
(Adhering to the 2016 (later updated in 2018) Code of Conduct on Hate Speech is evidence of compliance with the DSA, which gives platforms a strong incentive to police speech on their own rather than wait to get flagged) 1a.png
The UK was probably the most important Western government in the closure of the Internet. This began in 2017, when the UK govt pulled all YouTube ads as part of a press campaign against "hate speech" on the platform. 2a.jpg
Post-Brexit, the UK govt spent years hounding several social media companies and summoning/humiliating executives, most notably Facebook, over Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theories, including personally threatening Zuckerberg. 3a.jpg 4a.jpg
This culminated in Britain's 2023 Online Safety Act. Australia has actually gone further than Britain; its version of the OSA (2021) gave its e-safety commissioner (position created in 2015) the ability to remove content at will. 5a.png <second attachment in next post>
Australia was also the first country to force companies to break encryption on request, in 2018. 2b.png
In 2019, New Zealand announced a pledge to "counter online extremism," which most tech companies and Western governments immediately signed. The US did not (citing freedom of speech) until the Biden admin took office in 2021. 3b.png
US government pressure was generally informal and behind the scenes. For example, in 2021 the White House Director of Digital Strategy requested Facebook censor "borderline content," and Facebook complied. 4b.jpg 5b.jpg
Biden's Surgeon general similarly demanded social media companies redesign algorithms and impose clear consequences on violating accounts to reduce "misinformation." 1c.jpg
FBI pressure helped lead Facebook to censor the (true) New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election. 2c.png
CISA (a DHS sub-agency) explicitly talked about how to invest in third-party NGOs “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.” 3c.jpg
In 2020, one of the most important of these clearinghouses was Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was set up behind the scenes by the CISA. 4c.png
The EIP was then expanded into the Virality Project during the lockdowns, which explicitly tried to censor true stories that could fuel vaccine hesitancy, like a Cleveland Institute article on natural immunity. 5c.jpg
I've previously covered the Twitter Files, so I'll just reiterate: extensive FBI contacts including individual account deletion requests, multiple types of blacklist/algorithmic suppression.
reon2 · 2026-04-16 02:58 [#3383][report] >>12562 The EU, with its phenomenal market size and lack of meaningful internal opposition, was particularly important. The role they played was very critical, where in 2016 they "introduced voluntary legislation that saw Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft commit to regulating hateful speech" in the 2016-2019 closure of the Internet. 1.jpg
Whenever I complain about enormous Internet platforms engaging in giga-scale censorship and repression starting in 2016, I get a horde of morons telling me it's their First Amendment Right as private actors. These people are natural slaves; what matters is the censorship and not who does it. Open discourse and freedom of thought are intrinsically important, not because they're in the Constitution (roughly 3/4 of which is at best honored in the breach anyways). They're also wrong; governments have been involved in these censorship efforts from the beginning.
In order to do this moderation, tech companies needed "ground truth," which was outsourced to an ostensibly neutral (in reality very partisan) network of NGO fact-checkers.
To make fact-checking work during the closure of the Internet, social media platforms had to know the ground truth of claims. Since this is not precisely knowable, they outsourced determining the truth to a web of news organizations and NGOs. 1.png
Most official fact-checking organizations were certified by other the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), which created a chokepoint in the ecosystem. 2.png
The IFCN was founded by the Poynter Institute, a school of journalism, in 2015, after a $1M foundation grant. They hired an ex-SPLC employee to create a list of 515 orgs to be used in ad blacklists, including mainstream conservative ones like the Washington Examiner. 3.png 4.png
1/?
reon8 · 2026-04-16 02:58 [#3384][report] >>12597 Sometimes, claims are just wrong. But often, they are judged by fact-checkers as misleading for missing context (which may or may not be true - but what context is relevant is not prima facie obvious) or partly false based on nitpicking. Both types get suppressed. 5.png
Meta's initial source of ground truth was five US fact checkers, hired in 2016: PolitiFact, Factcheck[.]org, Snopes, ABC News, and the AP. All are correctly known to be strongly leftist and Democratic orgs, albeit with more neutrality than one like HuffPo. 1a.png
Another IFCN-like "alliance of news media, social media, and technology corporations" to "combat disinformation" was the Trusted News Initiative, founded in 2019 and closely linked to the British government. 2a.jpg
An example of one of the most academic orgs used by these various alliances was the SIO, the Stanford Internet Observatory, funded by the US government. This was eventually dismantled after House Republicans noticed it kept id'ing conservative arguments as disinformation. 3a.png 4a.png
Another similar org is the Digital Forensic Research Lab (note the date: founded 2016). 5a.png
Hamilton 68 was an extremely prominent "low-level" group which was used as a source by bigger fact-checkers (Snopes, Politifact). Their alpha was a list of Russian disinfo accounts... almost all of which turned out to be ordinary conservatives with no links to Russia. 1b.png
(You can see how easily national security concerns were weaponized against domestic opponents.) 2b.jpg
Another example of what these orgs looks like: Turnitin, which created a browser extensions for students that automatically flagged "misinformation." 3b.jpg 4b.png
Many fact-checking orgs were funded by, who else, the EU. The other major sources of funding were the tech platforms using them as ground truth and the big US foundations (think Ford Foundation), which have been notoriously leftist since the 60s. 5b.png
Another problem with these orgs: flagging obvious satire like the Babylon Bee. Why was this a problem? Because this automatically led to algorithmic suppression and potential demonetization on tech platforms. 1c.jpg
The problems with fact-checking orgs can be summed as follows: 1) These were partisan, left-leaning, and Democratic orgs. Even strictly within the bounds of factuality, there is (what you check vs don't, what counts as misleading, etc) almost infinite grounds for bias... 2c.jpg
(As an example: fact-checking claims that COVID wasn't very dangerous in 2020 by pointing out it was 10x as dangerous as the flu, and failing to do similar quantitative fact-checks for claims that huge numbers of unarmed blacks were slaughtered by police) 3c.jpg And these orgs did not stay strictly within the bounds of factuality; they were regularly wrong (eg COVID lab leak, actually almost everything related to COVID and the lockdowns, Hunter Biden laptop) and often waded into strictly political issues (mail-in ballots).
What you see with people who trust fact-checkers is that they are usually more than right on average (an extremely low bar) on most issues, but badly and systematically wrong (ironically, misinformed) on select issues of key national importance (eg COVID, police shootings). 4c.png
These orgs produced countless "media bias charts" which are taught in middle schools right now, and look like this. AP, to their credit, is often misleading but rarely lies, but NPR? HuffPost?: 5c.png
Or this. (LOL at Socialist Alternative being on par with the New York Post, or AP and Reuters not being solidly 'skews left') 1d.png
So you had "ground truth" deputized to a network of (Democratic, left-wing) partisans, whose personal views not only gained the sheen of neutral fact-checking, but had the power to systematically censor and suppress literally billions of social media posts. 2d.png
These fact-check networks were often publicly funded, and ~always funded by tax-advantaged foundations. They should be seen as a decentralized version of China's censorship apparatus. But it's worse, because unlike China, official truth changes daily and is never explicit.
reon3 · 2026-04-16 03:04 [#3388][report] >>12562 Funnily enough, just as tech was making their ostensible roles (uncovering and disseminating info) obsolete, journalists became deputized as truth oracles and gained official subsidies and privileges (like exemptions from German speech laws). Canada provides several privileges for officially-recognized media organizations, such as tax refunds up to 35% of labor costs and huge transfers directly from platforms where their content is posted. Australia, UK, South Africa, Brazil, and NZ have similar programs. 1.jpg 2.jpg
France subsidizes officially-recognized journalists to the tune of a billion pounds a year. The Nordics have a similar program. France and Italy also provide recognized journalists with tax credits. 3.png 4.jpg 5.jpg
Unsurprisingly (it is basically the UK with good weather and Silicon Valley), California is going down a similar route of state-subsidized media. 1a.png
Stepping away from direct subsidies for a moment, courts and the administrative state in the US have effectively created "reporter's privilege" not to have to reveal sources to official reporters. Non-reporters do not get this. 2a.png
In all cases, there was a very clear progression: each platform started by going after Neo-Nazis and similarly unsympathetic groups and within a couple of years escalated to alt-center, mainstream conservatives and mild-mannered academic types (psychometrics). I gave the timeline as 2015-2022, but it's never actually stopped, just somewhat receded thanks to Twitter's Musk era, the extreme excess during the lockdowns (eg shutting down lab leak discussion) provoking a backlash, and Republican officials wising up to what was going on.
As of now, there are two distinct phases: 1) 2015-2019, started by the migrant crisis, Brexit, and Trump I, which destroyed the Internet Right. 2) 2020-2022, related to the 2020 election and the lockdowns, which massively intensified everything and went after normies.
The effect of this on Internet discourse was to not only shift it extremely far to the left but to dumb it down. Like unpredictable environments leading to r-selection, ubiquitous censorship discouraged original research or high-effort books/essays/videos in favor of memes. 1.jpg
Seeing this happen in real time was immensely blackpilling and the fact that it isn't even widely-known and discussed that this happened (almost entirely in the last 11 years) is a travesty. "Closure of the Internet" is 1000 times worse than McCarthyism ever was. 2.jpg
I regret not being able to do this topic justice; it really needs a proper book/documentary/TV series, with interviews with key participants (eg Vijaya Gadde) and a look through archives of major institutions. Forum threads and essays are not enough.
lucid ## OPERATOR · 2026-04-16 20:55 [#3394][report] Pinning this thread because I believe it to be fundamental/foundational information for any newcomers unaware of the current situation and even for those who know the current situation but don't quite understand how it got to this point and why.
Anonymous · 2026-04-30 17:44 [#3569][report] The lynchpin that usually gets glossed over in this discussion: the Communications Decency Act.
Had Congress not given legal immunity to social media corpos they'd function in a much narrower scope and never get enough breadth to strangle the free Internet through the network effect. Alas now we have a new political class of bureaucrats skullfucking the Western world because Congress got mad they couldn't blanket regulate the internet like cable TV. The US leading this precedent and warping the Internet into the shape it is today will probably be looked on as the biggest mistake of the 21st century, 50-ish years from now.
This post proves cyberix needs archival links for important threads. Maybe something mods can click so it's not abused. Clicking on every link to save this is a PITA. And it strains in-browser screenshotting tools.
1. I remember YT purges in 2014 focused on manosphere content.
2. Post 2016 purges were a political reaction against Trump.
So this statement is inadequate:
> Before 2017, YouTube was a very open platform, with easy monetization and almost no moderation of legal content.
This covers only the post-Trump backlash. But Trump himself was a product of an already existing culture war struggle, fueled by ongoing and historical purges that pitted a fledgling loose confederation of right-leaning projects against a woke left liberal establishment.
It was the election of Trump that shocked the establishment and made the mainstream question the validity of free speech on the Internet. After all, if it created Trump, it has to be bad. This is when the Internet freedom roll back began.
Prior to this, in 2014, there was absolutely no reason whatsoever why you wouldn't have a Facebook ID. And you were suspect if you didn't. After 2016, the big tech firm were put under a cloud of suspicion, no doubt by the glow firms directed by the deep state to roll back uncooperative mass movements like MAGA. These operations were, of course, to be reserved for brown countries, not America.