fediverse

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Over the course of the past few years in particular, we have seen voices critical of the Empire driven off of these platforms. In the George Floyd uprising, we saw the collaboration of Twitter and Reddit in stifling the Blue Leaks (which coincidentally documented how US intelligence and law enforcement surveils and responds to social media in the midst of an uprising) along with the ban of r/ChapoTrapHouse and coup of r/PresidentialRaceMemes on Reddit. We saw them shut down the "woke" stream on Twitch, which aggregated daily live coverage of the uprising from cities across the country and around the world.

At the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war, we saw the removal of several news sources critical of the NATO line, while the presence of misinformation and psyops on Reddit and Twitter reached new heights. Reddit banned r/GenZhou (a ML educational community) and "quarantined" r/GenZedong for adopting a line which opposed NATO.

Now, with Gaza war, we are seeing the same pattern. Activists and journalists speaking in defense of the palestinian liberation movement are being removed from these platforms. The disinformation is absolutely mindblowing, with blood libel and demands for genocide circulating out of control. It makes the delerious state of social media at the outset of the Ukraine war look absolutely tame by comparison.

With every domestic and geopolitical crisis being followed by a series of ideological purges, they are going to reach a point where they have extinguished all meaningful opposition on the Silicon Valley platforms. As they approach that point, they will have to start disrupting the independent platforms which have been set up as an alternative. Communities like ours, as well as hundreds of others scattered across the Fediverse and various alternative platforms like Matrix, Telegram, Signal, etc.

The tactics are going to change too. These Silicon Valley platforms are either publicly traded companies, or VC-backed firms with the objective of seeking an IPO. The state can threaten their ability to profit, and they will turn on anybody to protect those profits. These soulless firms would hand Anne Frank's email and IP address straight to the Gestapo. There is no low which is too low when monopoly profits are on the line.

The motives of smaller, independent platforms are different, and often personal. A fedi admin may very well value their cozy lives and turn states evidence, or shut down under threat of legal/extralegal retaliation, but they very well might not. The politics of the network at large present unique dynamics as well, both in terms of narrative control and information collection. We might find that the state has no interest in playing whack-a-mole with tiny fedi instances and chooses instead to place an ultimatum upon the internet service providers where they are typically hosted. We might find instead that censorship mechanism are imposed by the telecoms which provide internet access to end users. It is not clear yet what tactics they will employ, but it is a certainty that they will take action eventually. Watch this space.