[meerita]

I have partially removed all my social networks except Twitter. I want to find out about things in real time, and from various sources, therefore Twitter is still a valid medium for this purpose. Although I interact little in the discussions.

Leaving Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and other networks gave me automatic anxiety relief. I no longer care what anyone close to me thinks and I don't get into discussions with close relatives.

My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop, just Twitter and being very careful with what I write and how I write it I can more or less start conversations. Sooner or later I will leave Twitter too, it is a matter of finding another social network, free and open and nurtured by people.

[thefz]

I kept Instagram to follow just some athletes I like, but I am increasingly thinking about killing Twitter too. I follow a very small group of people, mostly C# developers, but keeping a restricted pool of people alone does not warrant immunity from the incessant political battage of somebody's agenda, fough retweet after retweet, of which I want none.

I do really think Twitter is the most stressful of all. Nowadays there's no longer a sane discussion without this or that party injecting politics into even the most meaningless of debates.

[notzuck]

Not at all - I get the same problems. Most people at companies I have worked at are very liberal / left leaning which means I just get a stream of things I don't care about and don't agree with and if I seek out more conservative views I just end up going down the rabbit hole of extremist opinions.

Quitting social media and focusing more on the literature (books) that I want to read has gotten rid of my daily anger issues.

The right seem to be mostly bigots that can't think critically whereas the left mainly seem to be a bunch of idiots that can't think critically.

Maybe I'm the asshole because I think everyone else around me is?? Not sure.

[stolenmerch]

> Focusing more on the literature (books) that I want to read has gotten rid of my daily anger issues

Exactly this. Perhaps I'm a little more productive after quitting Twitter, but the huge takeaway for me was not raging every day. I'm no longer in a fake argument in my head with a stranger 1000 miles away. I'm now reading more and thinking more deeply for longer periods of time on more complex topics, which feels healthier.

[strzibny]

Yes. For example, I like Twitter for following some fellow engineers I value for their professional work or work in the community, but many of them inject a lot of leftist politics there, so my timeline is not what I want it to be.

[faceplanted]

On the other hand though, it's not anyone's duty to filter their worldview out of their speech. I have the same issue the other way around, where I follow a lot of young technical people and they just _love_ to be quoting and reposting young conservative voices, but it doesn't really make a difference to me to be scrolling past them.

[giancarlostoro]

> it's not anyone's duty to filter their worldview out of their speech.

Based on the former comments its sad because that is what seems to be happening. The SJW thought police will come for your heart and soul. I notice most conservatives are... Highly conservative about their world views being shared these days.

The amount of blind and not willing to ever listen hatred I see and hear these days is astonishing. I listen to both sides and I find it dumb we fall into the illusion that there is only a red or blue pill and that whatever we choose is right and everyone else is in the Matrix. That is so wrong it hurts. Theres no way to squeeze the needs and beliefs of 300m people into 1 political party.

On the other hand I accepted these truths long ago and realize its not my responsibility to stress too harshly over them. This is why I can survive social media. My views are my right. People used to say I may not agree with you but I will fight for your right to say it to the death. I am sure most people wouldnt nowadays till its too late and the government controls speech again.

[faceplanted]

See I get the exact opposite, conservatives I know constantly talk about their worldview, in the very annoying "facts don't care about your feelings" fashion, have you considered you might just be overlooking things that match your worldview as "not political", as people do.

[whitehouse3]

Twitter is a whole universe and not all edges are the same. It’s possible you both are right.

[meerita]

Lots of "conversatives" were banned. Lots. Many progressive still post trash and they still can be online. It's not new. Some conservatives are still up because their popularity, but they're shadowbanned 100% and demonitezed everywhere.

[sergiotapia]

In my experience conservatives learn quick to not talk about it ever in public. Liberals feel safe to shout out their opinions.

[meerita]

Yeah, I learnt this the hard way.

[meerita]

Same happens to me.

[rootusrootus]

There's probably a lot of right wing politics being spewed as well, but it's easy to tune out that which you agree with already. For me, social media seems to be a firehose of right wing propaganda. I guess that makes me progressive.

[meerita]

Well, for me is the opposite. I never saw right wing propaganda. Just everything left-wing. Even following suggestions in Twitter, Facebook or Instagram all i see are left wing personalities.

[chosenbreed37]

Interesting take...

> Leaving Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and other networks gave me automatic anxiety relief. I no longer care what anyone close to me thinks and I don't get into discussions with close relatives.

Do you still value face to face discussions/interactions with friends/close relatives? I think the medium (limited means of expression) and the disconnected nature can impact discussions negatively.

> My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop, just Twitter and being very careful with what I write and how I write it I can more or less start conversations. Sooner or later I will leave Twitter too, it is a matter of finding another social network, free and open and nurtured by people.

Mmm...is it just conservative leaning posts that are shot down? The other camp might possibly say the same thing. Although from I'm inclined to agree with you. The problem I see with this approach is that we begin to censor ourselves to ensure we don't say anything that might accept anybody. Given the range of people one finds on social media and the modern sensitivities it seems to be very difficult to say anything of note without someone getting upset. Back to your point...should we not welcome people challenging our ideas? Do all interactions have to be nurturing? Could there be some value in locking horns (figuratively) with people who hold different views?

[hailk]

Locking horns is useful if the nature of discourse were better. If you are going to be called sexist or racist (insert choice moralising label) every time you remotely resemble an outlier group strawman, with possibly real implication on your career (esp with the current progressive political tech climate), it's better to leave the platform. It's the same as leaving any other messaging board because of the toxicity.

[faceplanted]

I wouldn't say that's the current climate so much as the nature of publicly discussing politics under your real name. The number of people who've been fired from their jobs for advocating unions for example is terrifying.

[hailk]

I'd agree with you if you could show me when someone in the valley was fired for professing identity politics. I can show you examples the other way around, from FAANG companies nevertheless.

[intarga]

It's a change of times, go back a couple of decades and all the firings were in the opposite direction. If you want one example, look at Lynn Conway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

People have always been fired for publicly going against whatever is at the time politically correct, all that's changed is what's politically correct.

What really amuses me about this is that the people complaining about firings over political correctness don't seem (to me at least) to actually want to stop firings for political correctness, but just to change the definition of political correctness back to what suited them.

[briandear]

> The number of people who've been fired from their jobs for advocating unions for example is terrifying.

Terrifying?

Has this word lost its real meaning? Terrifying is having an angry mob show up at your house chanting "we know where you sleep" [1] or a group of Antifa terrorists physically attacking people like Brownshirts. [2]

Terrifying is having your life literally put at risk because you don't go along with the gospel of the day.

Terrifying is academics who are framing climate skepticism as some kind of criminal act worthy of prosecution.

> Denial is profoundly ideological in nature; how it is conveyed and transmitted is of importance to those who wish to reorient collective thinking to not only recognizing the urgency and seriousness of the problem but also recasting it in criminal terms. [3]

"Reorient collective thinking...recasting it in criminal terms"

Now that's terrifying: Academics advocating that skepticism of the orthodoxy should be quite literally criminalized! Now that should terrify people in the most Orwellian of ways.

Being fired for unionization is quite different than advocating Thought Police as actual police. One of the few cases I could find for Silicon Valley employees being fired for union activities, resulted in a nice pay-day from the lawsuit. [4]

If you're a left-wing person, a socialist, a Democrat, a purveyor of identity politics, you'll have no problems working in Silicon Valley assuming you have the relevant skills for the job. However, if you espouse any sort of ideas that even hint of conservatism or, (gasp!) free market capitalism, or even consider other viewpoints on something like climate -- your job security is far less than someone of the opposite political persuasion. In Silicon Valley, being a conservative is not unlike being part of a secret society. [5]

As far as people getting fired for "advocating unions," -- while I haven't actually seen many cases of that among tech companies, getting fired for organizing what amounts to a worker mutiny doesn't seem like a surprising outcome. However, there are definitely conservatives that have been fired for nothing more than their beliefs. [6]

Getting fired for opinions is far more "terrifying" than getting fired for actively trying to disrupt the workplace by telling people to essentially rebel/organize against the company. Getting fired for what you believe is a vastly different story than getting fired for what you actually do. Kevin Cernekee got fired from Google because of a viewpoint, not because of any action he took (such as encouraging people to walk out or "organize.") How about getting blacklisted because of political beliefs? [7]

However, getting fired isn't "terrifying" -- especially if you're a software engineer where one can literally find a new job in less than a week, assuming a modicum of recent experience.

Calling things terrifying has become such a cliché [8] that it diminishes the seriousness of things that are actually terrifying -- such as being subjected to violence, a threat of violence, or people advocating the arrest of dissidents by Thought Police and being sent to the Ministry of Love.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/08/mob-... [2] https://quillette.com/2019/06/30/antifas-brutal-assault-on-a... [3] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-3640-9_... [4] https://www.salon.com/2019/04/30/software-engineers-at-promi... [5] https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/10/technology/culture/divided-... [6] https://nypost.com/2019/08/01/google-engineer-claims-he-was-... [7] https://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-google-employee... [8] http://survivetvnewsjobs.com/so-cliche-overused-phrase-list/...

[rpmisms]

Put it this way. James Damore was fired and shamed for having the wrong ideas on how to make the workplace more equitable. I challenge you to find someone who got fired from a FAANG company after publicly announcing that men are trash.

[notzuck]

On various google internal comms you can declare that men are trash and not get sacked. I think Damore had a few screenshots of similar.

[meerita]

The Google leaks shown many employees calling "hitler" to many public figures and inciting banning and shadowbanning is one of the examples of the bias they have.

[meerita]

> Do you still value face to face discussions/interactions with friends/close relatives? I think the medium (limited means of expression) and the disconnected nature can impact discussions negatively.

Face to face, yes. It's different. But when I did it online, close relatives and friends get outraged easily and they called me all kind of things, just because it's easier to do it through facebook or instagram, than face to face. The ideal place to show everyone you can insult others.

[catacombs]

> My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop

I doubt you have high enough conservative clout to be targeted for censorship. What examples do you have of Facebook, Google and Instagram specifically censoring you for your views?

> Sooner or later I will leave Twitter too, it is a matter of finding another social network, free and open and nurtured by people.

"Free and open" means a place where people of all views can have civilized conversations.

[rootusrootus]

Yeah, I left Facebook altogether because the stream of right-wing vitriol was overpowering. Just couldn't take it anymore. I'm not angry by nature, but I felt myself getting drawn in by it and I needed to escape for my own health. I am pretty sure that I will never be able to talk someone that angry down from their soapbox, so ... I just let it go.

I wish you luck finding that bubble you're looking for. It probably does exist somewhere, just have to locate it.

[gerbilly]

>My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop

I would have thought that it's the best time ever to be a conservative.

Seems to me that we are awash in conservative views, and that conservatives have had much more success in framing the debate than 'liberals' have.

As evidence I'd cite the fact that we are debating each and every issue that keep social conservatives up at night.

[rpmisms]

I would say that conservative views are beginning to gain more traction because of censorship. There's nothing people want to read more than a banned book.

[meerita]

I got my post deleted from Facebook. I just cheered my country banned abortion.

[markhalonen]

Liberals are crushing it. Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage in 2008. Think about that, how fast liberals are changing society. Liberals are absolutely crushing it.

[_1qd4]

I’m curious why you’re being censored. Are you a fiscal conservative, or a social conservative?

Because I have a bunch of fiscal conservatives on my Facebook and the only thing they post about is monetary policy. Nothing about abortions, marriage, immigration, or policing - the things social conservatives tend to drive themselves red in the face with.

It might be worth examining your own discourse to understand why you were being censored (or felt you were being censored). I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, I’m just wondering if you’ve ever reflected on what you post and how people react to it.

[rpmisms]

And what's the difference? What makes being a social conservative less valid? You're coming from a very high-and-mighty standpoint here, when the simple truth is that he should not be censored.

[jbob2000]

I don't want to get into the mud on social conservatism. These people want to undo abortion and marriage rights, among a lot of other social progress we have made. Do I really need to explain the difference between someone who likes to debate interest rate hikes with someone who wants to remove rights for women and LGBT people?

I'm not being high and mighty. I simply asked if he had reflected on why he felt censored. If he was sharing fake news about Hillary being a lizard person, then yeah, I understand why people would remove him from their newsfeed.

[rpmisms]

And there you go. Check your bias, because it's making you sound remarkably like you have an excellent elbow-pad-and-fedora collection,

[nabnob]

It's not just conservatives. I'm an old school, anti-identity politics leftist and feminist, and the modern "left" is more concerned with using the right language than having the correct analysis or actually defending basic rights.

[sascha_sl]

Suggestion: Read Foucault.

[nabnob]

Foucault and other post modernists defended pedophilia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of...

I'll stick with Marx and dialectical materialism, which offer actual tools to fight systemic oppression, rather than moral relativism.

[ctdonath]

We're seeing an awful lot of high profile conservatives, noted for politely expressing widespread views, being censored for stating something the dominant ideology objects to - something for which there is reasonable, if irritating, disagreement over.

[onefuncman]

I don't know what a high profile conservative is, can you reinforce your point with specific examples?

[ctdonath]

Just casually considered...

James Woods, famous actor and outspoken conservative, was repeatedly suspended on Twitter for posting reasonable comments. He finally quit Twitter in frustration.

Scott Adams, major cartoonist and popular Trump-observing pundit, is regularly demonetized on YouTube for no apparent reason. Some videos are removed entirely if he says certain words perfectly sensible for polite political discourse. Fortunately he has "F U money" and continues producing political content.

Popular conservative show "Louder With Crowder" (of the "...change my mind" meme) has been functionally demonized by YouTube and is struggling to stay afloat on their own servers. Crowder simply expresses views conservatives think reasonable.

There are many such cases.

[ssully]

I don't go on Twitter much anymore, but last I saw of James Woods he was saying something about hanging people and I remember Crowder getting heat for using homophoic slurs. It wasn't a smear job - I watched the videos myself.

I don't know much about Scott Adams, so I can't comment on that. But your examples so far are not reasonable people.

[ctdonath]

And yet Leftist calls to metaphorically/actually "kill whitey", depictions of Trump's head severed, advocacy/support of Antifa violence, vicious takedowns of anything resembling white or straight "pride" (no different than any other "pride" movement), dismantling of "safe spaces" in favor of others, and a host of other overt assaults on conservatism for simply existing/disagreeing remain in public with no equivalent censorship.

When one side is smacked down for the slightest transgression as perceived by the other, yet the other gets a pass for all but the most overt calls to violence against the former, we have a problem.

[jowsie]

Crowder is a poor example as his troubles come mainly from the fact that he keeps specifically targeting people with harassment campaigns. It probably doesn't help that his go to insults are all homophobic.

[meerita]

Well, to give you an example (I'm conservative both in the social and economics), and when I posted that I was happy the abortion law was banned in my country, cheering up, Facebook flagged my post, and deleted it. On another ocasion i got banned for posting a political opinion that was pro-Trump (nothing fanatical, to be honest) and I got flagged and delete the post bymyself.

I lost 10 Twitter accounts because I argued with facts, without ad hominem. It's hard to state the truth if it goes agaisn't their bias. It's ok, it's their business.

[catacombs]

> I lost 10 Twitter accounts because I argued with facts, without ad hominem. It's hard to state the truth if it goes agaisn't their bias. It's ok, it's their business.

You either have way too much free time or seriously need to reconsider your hobbies.