[raxxorrax]

I can give you hundreds of examples of people being accused of being a white nationalist without any merit to it. To such a degree that this word almost lost its meaning.

edit: Tim Pool for example was already accused. It will clearly be used to shut down unwelcome dissent.

[pmarreck]

A while back, my leftist circles kept repeating ad nauseam that Peter Thiel (who is already in a minority, being gay) is a white nationalist. I suspected bullshit and decided to look into it.

All I could find was this: Peter Thiel once spoke at a libertarian conference. Libertarians, being libertarians, permit racism (read: not the same as "support racism"). THEREFORE, PETER THIEL IS A WHITE NATIONALIST.

Are you fucking serious? I pushed back on my leftist friends with what I found. "Duhhhhh, errrrrr, ummmmm, well... everyone just knows he is!" Oh, really.

Bullshit, repeated often enough as truth, becomes evidence for itself.

[pmarreck]

Honest question, why is this getting downvoted?

[zymhan]

Because it's a straw man argument. GP (you) is talking about some argument their friends made, not something anyone in this thread has said.

[pmarreck]

But it was a related example of how echo chambers can corrupt the truth

[namlem]

Ok but have any of these falsely accused actually had their account removed?

[mike10010100]

> I can give you hundreds of examples of people being accused of being a white nationalist without any merit to it.

Feel free to do so whenever. Be sure to indicate when that has resulted in serious consequences for the "victim".

> Tim Pool for example was already accused.

TBF Tim Pool pulled the whole "I'm so neutral" act when dealing with a bunch of actual white supremacists. What "dissent" was unwelcome there? That he was pretending like these were totally fine people who just happened to think that genocide was okay?

[AsyncAwait]

Before we make this into 'conservatives being silenced', it's worth pointing out that the censorship problem also exists for leftists outlets that are left of the neoliberal centrist view of the D.C. Democratic Party.

[raxxorrax]

Taking a stand against content moderation was a fundamental leftist position some years ago...

That said, I absolutely agree that leftist positions do get censored. Even if I currently like to underline my dissociation with its authoritarian excesses and general dishonesty on certain subjects, the problem is a general one.

[pas]

Unrestricted free speech was always a strange issue. Hitchens' very eloquently presented how control of speech was used to suppress a lot of groups, and he knew about the dangers of radicalization, incitement, hate speech, but considered those negatives acceptable.

However not everyone thinks that it's so great.

I don't know, and it's probably not something we can just settle easily.

It's usually true, that a society cannot simply rely on "laws" to save it, and when the power imbalance get too extreme, then laws won't save anyone anyway. Though it seems having some kind of policy and publicly agreed way to stop serial inciters is not a bad idea. After all information censorship generally happens through claims of potential national security hazards and other gag orders, not by a too wide interpretation of hate speech laws. (But of course human creativity is pretty limitless when it comes to suppressing others.)

[mike10010100]

> the censorship problem also exists for leftists outlets that are left of the neoliberal centrist view of the D.C. Democratic Party.

Which ones, specifically?

[oarabbus_]

such as...

[AsyncAwait]

Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, Aaron Maté, Michael Tracey, Abby Martin, Matt Taibbi, Katie Halper, Ben Norton, Lee Camp, Ilhan Omar, Mark Ames etc.

There are many, just some off the top of my head.

[paulddraper]

I'm only familiar with a couple of those names.

Who/what de-platformed Jimmy Dore (here's his YouTube channel; [1])? Or the rest?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3M7l8ved_rYQ45AVzS0RGA

[AsyncAwait]

He's been smeared in CNN & Washington Post articles as a crank and conspiracy theorist who runs 'an extremist channel' who should face consequences, has videos constantly demonetized and de-ranked etc.

His channel is not 'deleted', (as is the case with the majority of right-wing commentators as well btw), but it is very much 'shadowbanned'/blacklisted, (economic ruin).

I for example regularly notice the recommendation algorithm skews a lot more towards the centre & right actually even when I am specifically looking for Jimmy Dore videos.

People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.

On Twitter, a lot of them don't even come up in the search results, effectively shadowbanned.

Of course, none of them would be invited on mainstream TV because their viewpoint is not allowed in 'polite circles'.

This is why I have a huge issue with the right simplistically equating D.C. Democrats with 'the left'. I suppose the division is as to what do you care about, social leftism, (identity politics), which is easy & lazy and what many on the right focus on vs economic leftism, which is what many of those I named discuss and is not really allowed on mainstream media.

[paulddraper]

For me, Twitter's results for "Dore" show Jimmy Dore as the #3 result [1], following two handles with many more followers.

Contrast that to "Limbaugh", for which Rush Limbaugh is the (buried) #11 result, despite having 2x the followers anything else.

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=Dore&src=typed_query

[2] https://twitter.com/search?q=limbaugh&src=typed_query

[mike10010100]

> His channel is not 'deleted', (as is the case with the majority of right-wing commentators as well btw), but it is very much 'shadowbanned'/blacklisted, (economic ruin).

And, as we all know, nobody ever made money off of extremist political commentary before YouTube, right kids?

FFS he has his own website and show. Just because YouTube doesn't give him money doesn't mean he's persecuted. He can feel free to host his videos elsewhere.

> (economic ruin).

Hyperbole alert!

> People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.

Please cite some sources. I'm not really finding any info.