[pugets]

Modern American leftism, at least on social media, is really weird.

You have a lot of these so-called leftists rebelling against the philosophies of Marx and other communist philosophers on very fundamental issues (e.g. gun ownership for the proletariat, or the freedom of speech) all because of the current political climate in America. At the same time, these people will support and protect Big Tech and other capitalist interests when it is politically convenient to do so. I've heard American leftism once jokingly called Socialism with Silicon Valley Characteristics.

Ask any one of these new-age leftists what they think of Alex Jones' YouTube channel being banned, and they will hit you with a response that would disturb any of the Gen X leftists who grew up in an era where Communist was a dirty word and the protection of free speech was a top-most necessity. New-age leftists have grown up in the left-sympathetic social media era and cannot conceptualize the pendulum ever swinging the opposite direction.

[jim-jim-jim]

In practice I think mainstream liberals are the gleefully censorious ones, not leftists. In a sibling comment I called these guys losers, but you can't argue that they're not walking the walk by setting up their own platforms. The people in these alt communities have been kicked off Reddit for rightfully pointing out how astroturfed it is by advertisers, police, and military agencies, so I'm not sure if you'd find much love for big tech among their ranks.

Setting up your own community with specific standards is totally fine imo.

[Saptarishi]

>Setting up your community with specific standards is totally fine imo

In some sense I agree, but what happens when these communities begin to overflow with people, and chaos increases? It leads to opinion suppression( no I'm not talking about extreme opinions on any side of the political spectrum , I'm talking about opinions which differ from the status quo ), echo-chamber creation, and worst of all, unnecessary aggressive behaviour and mud slinging.

[uabstraction]

This criticism could just as easily apply to Reddit. The entire thing is an echochamber of American civic religion and they ban any subversive communities. Their director of content policy was plucked straight out of the Atlantic Council for f sake.

[arcatech]

The thing that's weird is trying to group a bunch of people with differing sub-views on things into one "leftist" group and then trying to judge them all at once. Obviously they'll seem odd when you do that.