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Fantastic post.

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Jun 2, 2021Liked by Ives Parr

In general this seems accurate, but I think in one case you are wrong about conservatives' desires to censor being less effective. Censorship of pornography is a typically conservative cause, but one shared by enough moderates to be followed by major technology platforms, so that many of them now either ban it entirely or hide it behind warnings and registration requirements (e.g. Twitter uses the same sorts of warnings about pornography that it does about right-wing politics in images & links).

An obvious corollary of the point that you make here is that, for censorship on some platform not to exert a political bias to the left, the platform must be difficult to censor overall. (Email and cryptocurrency are examples of this, as is the overall structure of the internet; IIUC Mastodon is trying to do this too but being more or less a Twitter clone they lack the popularity to make it work.) In practice, since some degree of censorship is necessary to prevent the platform from being filled with unpleasant (e.g. spam) or illegal (e.g. child pornography) content, this would seem to mean either that the design of the platform would necessarily give users the option to see unpopular content (as with email, where even spam is easily visible to those so inclined), or that users can choose between a variety of different moderation regimes (as with Mastodon hosts or early Reddit's subreddits); moreover, the platform must be decentralized, as a single host is a single point of failure for censorship (cf. Reddit). Thus a potential way to try to address this problem might be to encourage this sort of structure in developing large-scale platforms for online discussion. (This assumes that most important discussion will take place on large-scale platforms, but reversal of this trend currently seems unlikely.)

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022Liked by Ives Parr

I like this post but I also find the existence of your entire substack to be uncanny.

1. I just decided to see if 'parrhesia' is available, because it is a better name than what I currently have (STEEP, from the Horizon Scanning/Futures world). I stumbled on you, which leads to my second point:

2. You're writing very similarly to me. This post is almost the complimentary mirror-image of my own, Parler Games. I won't link it because I'm not trying to get clout like that. I'm just positively surprised.

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Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023

I disagree with your characterisation of left-wingers claiming that conservatives are "evil" and of right-wingers claiming that leftists are "stupid". At least in internet discussions, its often conservatives who consider "liberal elites" to be "evil" and leftists accuse those who vote for Right-wing parties to be "voting against their own interests", i.e. that they are stupid...

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