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New York Times Whines: 'Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right'
For years, New York Times reporters used their “reporting” to encourage social media companies to drive conservatives off of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook through blacklisting, censorship, hysterical fearmongering over what liberals consider “misinformation,” even attempts to eavesdrop on suspected gatherings of wrong-think.
“Journalist” Taylor Lorenz in particular longed to play social media hall monitor, lamenting in February 2021 that one couldn’t listen in on private conversations taking place within online apps like Clubhouse [remember Clubhouse?]. Now, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and Trump’s Truth Social, one of those would be monitors, San Francisco-based reporter Sheera Frenkel, whined that the left has no safe sandbox left to play in.
Check out this headline deck: “Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right -- If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was the ascendancy of social platforms for the right. That puts Democrats at a disadvantage.”
Do violins come that small?
After Donald J. Trump won the election this month, his supporters gravitated to a panoply of online destinations to celebrate.
Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Mr. Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the president-elect owns. Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. Gab, Parler and other right-wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Mr. Trump.
No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta’s Instagram, Threads and Facebook had publicly de-emphasized politics leading up to the election. Mr. Musk had transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. And no other tech platform had gained momentum as a public square for liberals.
But not for lack of trying: Economist turned Democratic hack Paul Krugman has devoted a couple of Times columns to trying to escape Elon Musk.
If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.
The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago.
(Decisions strongly supported by the censor supporters at the Times, including Frenkel.)
After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Facebook and Twitter booted Mr. Trump and his far-right supporters from their platforms. In response, Mr. Trump and his allies, who accused the tech companies of censorship, flocked to or started their own social media sites that promoted conservative causes. By the time the mainstream platforms allowed Mr. Trump and other right-wing figures to return, they had increased their online followings and influence.
Frenkel noted that Facebook and Twitter “removed the accounts of militia groups that had participated in the riot and other far-right supporters of the 'Stop the Steal; movement,” and also froze Trump’s personal accounts, causing conservatives to migrate to Gab and Parler.
It seems that once the political censorship slowed, social media becomes a more hospitable place for conservatives.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, became less political. In January 2020, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors that he was “considering steps” to reduce political content on Facebook. Over the next four years, he disbanded the company’s election integrity team, which focused on securing information around elections, and removed tools that allowed researchers and reporters to track misinformation.
Frenkel pushed the left’s latest idea of a social media safe space: the X-like platform Bluesky.
On Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, lauded Bluesky as a welcoming place.
“A thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism,” she wrote.
Actually, it sounds like a censorious leftist hellhole. After the post-election influx, the “Bluesky Safety” team reported: “In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports.”
Sounds like lefty-on-lefty infighting already.
Here's Jordan Schachtel of The Dossier, commenting on Bluesky under the email subject line: “I got banned from BlueSky for committing wrongthink,” wrote: “Far from its corporate media-advertised depiction as a place for joy and friendly conversation. BlueSky is a safe space for seething left-wingers to engage exclusively with their political allies and to rage at their perceived enemies.”
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