Censorship of Right-Wingers is Real
The real reason websites silence conservatives
They break the rules and annoy everyone, mostly.
Keeping the peace on the internet has always been a thankless task. In years past I would’ve even argued it was outright pointless. “The Internet Is Serious Business” was the thing we said that we believed was a lie, in the era where the only people on the internet were weird nerds who never went outside. Now everyone uses the internet, and nobody goes outside.
The stakes are a little higher now.
In that era, Terms of Service were not a thing. None of the social media juggernauts existed yet. You were a fancy website if you had rules posted at all, and there was one that was understood to take precedent over all others: don’t piss off the admin. Don’t be annoying. This unspoken social protocol exists for a whole host of reasons, but the most important is this:
Without the threat, however remote, of getting punched in the face in person, more rules are necessary.
You cannot get punched in the face over the internet. There are no physical or immediate consequences, and often no consequences at all, for antisocial behavior such as lying or provoking or spamming or trolling beyond getting the boot. That’s the only recourse websites do have, really.
Right-wingers complain about persecution on the internet. Being singled out for moderation or their posts being deleted, and that this represents an inherent bias against them that has to be corrected. I’d actually agree that the first half of that belief is mostly true. They do get singled out.
Because they break the rules, and are annoying.
Despite the looming Dust Bowl cloud of AI automization and spam looming on the horizon, pretty much any website that allows users to interact with it ultimately has a human somewhere in the spanner works. This was especially true early on in the internet, where almost every single website operated by the Benevolent Dictator model to wit there was really only one rule: don’t annoy the admin. Or the mods, if the admin had given them power to ban people. There was never any expectation that either of these were obligated to tolerate the presence of troublemakers.
The internet changed. The social media juggernauts arrived, websites got bigger, moderation teams more anonymous. A lot of these websites became so huge that paying a team of humans to monitor all content became unprofitable so the systems to monitor posts became automated to simply act on anything that violated a website’s TOS.
That is where the problems began; where problem users began to deveop a sense that they had a right to use a website. First arising in the early days of the Obama Administration, the story of a right-winger complaining they got censored for posting something outright false or bigoted is practically a genre at this point. You probably have a relative yourself whom you’ve seen gripe about it. They’re right. These websites are singling them out.
For breaking the rules, and being annoying.
All right, I’m banging on this drum a lot. What do I mean by this?
Pretty much every social media website that matters has some manner of community standards, which is a fancy way of saying of what not to do. For example, here’s Facebook’s:
Don’t assume false identities, don’t make threats, don’t doxx anyone, and most importantly, don’t be a jerk. It is that last one that’s the sticking point, because being a right-winger on the internet necessarily means espousing things that are often outright lies, and doing so in a matter that borders on spam (which is also usually against any website’s rules). But I’m not going to deny that leftists aren’t just as capable of breaking website rules on the internet, which is why my thesis comes in two parts.
Right-wingers on the internet hate following basic rules, but just as importantly, maybe even more importantly, they are annoying. They go out of their way to be a problem, and within the last twenty years have made it a political project that the world is obligated to tolerate their behavior in every environment.
Right-wingers get banned from websites, because they annoy the people that run the websites. They also usually annoy the users to the point where there is the threat of users leaving if they’re allow to keep being annoying, forcing the moderators to intervene.
Because they break the rules, and are annoying.
Because right-wingers destroy social spaces.
For example, take voat. Founded as a “Free Speech” alternative to reddit, and pretty much overnight became infamous for endless nazi spam and swastickas on the front page. And then died.
Take 4chan. Always notoriously light on moderation, and then began a noticable decline in quality that correlated perfectly with the website’s increasing right-wing bent.
Take Gab, another “Free Speech” platform that has laughable activity compared to any of the websites it copies because nobody wants to go there. For some reason.
Take 8chan. What if 4chan if run by a guy who, you guessed it, cares a whole lot about “Free Speech”. A site linked to multiple mass shootings, neo-nazi activity, spam, and outright illegal content involving children.
Take Twitter. Bought by another man who cared a lot about Free Speech. A website now in the active stages of death to other websites due to it being increasingly overrun by spam and hostile trolling. A website where the new owner personally intervened in unbanning an account that posted CSAM. For some reason, the same environments proliferate right-wing activity are somehow the same exact environments where spam and scams and murder and neo-nazi criminality and child pornography thrive.
What an interesting coincidence!
Let’s step back here.
There’s a story I like to tell.
Back in the late 1800s, the Third French Republic was deeply politically divided. In this environment of stark polarization, the country was ripe for a single issue to split the country into two camps.
That issue found itself in Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Jewish descent. Accused of selling artillery secrets to the German military after several intelligence leaks, he was swiftly tried and convicted to life imprisonment for treason.
A pretty open-and-shut case.
There was just one tiny problem: Alfred Dreyfus was completely innocent.
The trial was a complete sham, and just a few years later the French military discovered the true culprit of the leaks and quietly acquitted him to avoid a scandal. In the meantime, many French publications had begun to reveal what a farce Dreyfus’ conviction was, and had begun to campaign for his release.
Because Dreyfus was Jewish, in an era of extreme antisemitism within France, this unjust conviction and appeal for its reversal quickly became the most divisive issue in France to the point that French politics could largely be describes as being either Dreyfusard (those who supported Dreyfus and wanted him acquitted) and Anti-Dreyfusards (who believed Dreyfus was guilty and deserved his conviction, and often believed he deserved far worse).
Because Dreyfus was Jewish, the Anti-Dreyfusards also tended to be overwhelmingly antisemetic. Many opportunists latched onto this tendency, using it to support one cause or another or even to just further incite violence against French Jews.
That is all stage setting for this point in the story: out of all the Anti-Dreyfusards, probably the singularly most vile of them was a man named Édouard Drumont.
Out of all the Anti-Dreyfusards, he was perhaps the most ardent. The most dedicated. A man whose antisemetic rhetoric was hauntingly familiar to the kind that would play out in Germany three decades later.
The man even had a magazine. A magazine that reached the height of its popularity during the Dreyfus Affair, as it became to be called, and a magazine whose front cover looked shockingly similar to the anti-Jewish propaganda that would be used by the NSDAP in Germany in roughly thirty years’ time.
The name of that magazine? La Libre Parole.
“The Free Speech.”
Nothing is new under the sun indeed.
When right-wingers complain about Free Speech, about their behavior being discouraged, one must ask themselves: what do they want to say? To do? Because over and over and over and over we’ve seen what they’ve done, and what they’ve done every time is defile the written word, lie, and ruin whole forms of media. And when unchallenged, left to do far worse.
How many times do we have to see this happen? How many more broken husks of once-vibrant places do we let be left behind before we grow wise to the actual reason right-wingers get banned from websites?
I assume you use the internet, so I level it to you: who do you see causing more problems? Because every time, every time, every time a website fails to keep the bigots in check, it dies. Not always quickly, but it dies. Every time. Without fail.
Because right-wingers can’t behave or follow rules, and because they’re annoying.
Because free from consequence, they show us what they really are.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt stops now.