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Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from US Department of Defense website
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I'd argue the internet was moving things left, while the bar for entry was at least nominal. When the bar for sharing your ideas was at least as high as "learn to code HTML and find a place to put your site up" the Time Cube cranks were few and far between, and most people participating on the web could be assumed to have some modicum of intelligence. However, the defining factor of the Internet as it stands, dominated by social media platforms, is that it's frictionless by design. And yes, the platforms are pushing right-wing content, but to a certain extent that's accidental, or at least was when engagement algorithms first became a part of the experience. Left wing content, reality-based as it tends to be, is generally full of nuance, equivocation, and explanation that takes time and (critically) doesn't reach down into the basal structures of the brain and squeeze the amygdala quite like a right-wing fearmonger shouting "TRANS PEOPLE ARE SNEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER'S SCHOOL RESTROOM TO ASSAULT HER BE AFRAID!"
Could social media be designed to put the brakes on reactionary content and boost thoughtful, well-researched opinions? Yeah, probably. But that requires expensive and time-consuming human intervention in the form of fact-checking, and doesn't boost engagement like content that just pushes all the fight-or-flight buttons way down in the lizard brain. Making the Internet easy and frictionless only turbocharged Terry Pratchett's idea that "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on," because technology makes the lie spread faster than ever, but the process of getting to the truth never got easier at quite the same rate.
I would argue it was moving the bar left up until occupy/anonymous triggered the major reactionary push that saw all the algorithms militarize, and the major push to turn every man born after 1986 into a literal nazi. the truth, or at least vibes in the general vicinity of the right idea that were mostly truth-compatible.
it's great to be elitist, and, yes, there were fewer of certain kinds of fucking idiot on the early internet, but that's not when the political valence really changed. that's not when it became a tool of ignorance. People were getting educated on the internet for a while there. it was kind of cool.