[xtian]

I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.

The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.

[subsuboptimal]

I'd put money on that. Your wager is "by September 2027, Cloudflare will remove sites critical of the imperial powers using hate speech as a cover for removing said critical content"?

I'd take that bet on a heartbeat. Cloudflare will absolutely remove others from their service in the next 5 years, but they will be kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms. As long as we can agree that none of them would satisfy the conditions of your bet.

[xtian]

Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.

The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.

Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

[ryan_lane]

> Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

A number of these people legitimately are domestic terrorists. Domestic terror groups helped setup Jan 6 and the trucker protests. If you attend events setup by domestic terror groups, well, there's a good saying: "If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."

[xtian]

That’s an idiotic saying which justifies criminalizing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people for something they have no control over. In none of the cases that I mentioned are these ideologies anything but an extremely fringe and non-influential minority.

Is it so impossible to imagine that it was arranged for some of these fringe individuals to appear and then be over-represented in media coverage? What easier way is there of immediately discrediting an anti-establishment popular movement in the minds of witless liberals? Let’s recall that the funding and utilization of Nazi and extremist groups by five eyes intelligence agencies around the world is well documented.