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0 pointssnowwrestler6y ago0 comments

> 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.

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concordDance6y ago

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.

mindslight6y ago

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.

fatbird6y ago

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.

michaelmrose6y ago

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.

kelnos6y ago

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.

js86y ago

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.)

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