Civics & Free Speech, The Closure of the Internet
But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”
The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.
These purges are usually framed as a direct response to particular events or atrocities. For example Amazon ostensibly removed all Confederate flag merchandise from their web store in response to Dylan Roof’s 2015 massacre of black churchgoers. This is a mistake. Atrocities without a propaganda campaign from the press and political pressure from an opaque network of governments and quasi-government NGOs lead to no changes. There were no mass purges after Audrey Hale’s 2023 murder of elementary schoolers in Nashville motivated by anti-white hatred or the 2016 murder of five Dallas police officers by an ex-marine motivated by the BLM movement. On the other hand, press campaigns not centered around an atrocity, such as the mass deplatformings of YouTube personalities, lead to the same types of purges as the atrocity-based ones. It is not the atrocity that causes the changes, but the media and behind-the-scenes pressure campaign.
