> it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship.
It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.
If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.
Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.
On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.
In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.
In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.
You're conflating two very different environments. Mass media of yesterday was the establishment broadcasting carefully considered things. Social media today is individuals chatting to other individuals in a manner that can incidentally be seen by everyone. People using say, hackernews, aren't modelling this interaction as if they are on the stage being broadcasted to the world, they are modelling it as if they were talking to someone at a pub.
The proper comparison is not what a politician could say 20 years ago, but rather what a well-known software figure could say on a mailing list. "Predating social media by decades", you should appreciate how online communication was before the status-gamers got here and reasserted their tribalistic bullshit.
I hate that the parent is being downvoted. It speaks to the poor quality of the community at HN. Parent is absolutely right: twenty or thirty years ago, you were driven from the public sphere for merely a fraction of what passes today as 'within bounds'. Every cry of how we're self-censoring and being chilled rings hollow with every tweet by the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Whining about the boundaries now is just a confession of how little history you know.
The boundaries have always depended on who you are. Most of us aren't billionaires with the office of the president of one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the services of the strongest military on the planet, and millions of admirers to shield us.
This extremely perverse situation tells us a good bit about a lot of our fellow citizens but nothing about what the rest of us can get away with nor the constraints placed upon us.
If I said something that was misconstrued sufficiently enough for thousands of people to hear about it and hate me even wrongly I wouldn't be giving up my position at MIT I would probably end up homeless until lack of Asthma medication caused me to suffocate.
Part of that not having billions of dollars to fall back on thing.
I think there's more nuance, though. Trump gets a pass (and even praise) for the garbage he spews because he has so many supporters. RMS gets kicked out because his community demands better.
If you or I said something stupid, it'd either not be noticed much at all, or get 15 minutes of fame and then fade into obscurity. In reality, our lives wouldn't change all that much. Yes, there's an outside chance that we could do something so dumb that we'd lose our jobs, but that's vanishingly unlikely, and still, I'd expect the effect to be temporary.
>I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
>How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.
>The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)
>The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
>As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.
Actually, no one brought this to our attention until a user emailed about it earlier today. If you don't see something being moderated that should be, the likeliest explanation is the simplest: we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing all the posts on HN. There are far too many.
As the site guidelines explain, the way to react to a bad comment on HN is not to feed it by replying, but rather to flag it and (in egregious cases) to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Posting more comments complaining about lack of moderation doesn't help, for the same reason: we might not see it. In fact we probably won't, if we didn't see the original post in the first place. Making your complaint as sarcastic and cruel as you can doesn't add to its visibility.
Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them? They're written the way they are because, to avoid HN deteriorating further, users need to help preserve the site. Letting moderators know about egregious comments (in ways that work—flagging or emailing) is one way the guidelines ask you to do that. Not being snarky or calling names is another.
You and your alt account do not make up "the community". Since I make comments related to the articles and discussions then I am way more a part of the HN community than you are. Anyway, I invite you and your alt account to respond to the content of what I write in order to have a constructive conversation.
It's an interesting dynamic. I would agree that on the whole, you're probably correct that there is less censorship in the society.
However, it seems that the political division is greater than ever. It is almost as if there are two Overton windows now, one for liberals and one for republicans (roughly).
The republican one shifted to much less self-censorship, while the liberal one shifted very slightly to more self-censorship.
And RMS seems to be caught in the liberal one. He has held his opinions for a long time, and nobody really cared that much.
He is also not a particularly powerful figure. If anything, FSF is weaker than it has been in the 90s. That's also an interesting change in dynamics, the shifting of both windows now affects powerful and powerless alike, where in the past, it was I believe considered less decent to have "wrong opinions" if you were powerful, and the wrong opinions of the powerless were tolerated much more. (Basically, the difference between elites and proletes, and agreement who is what, is now morphing into a difference between liberals and republicans.)
It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.
If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.
Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.
On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.
In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.
In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.