I frequent platforms run by informed and educated and reputable owners and moderators. When those platforms silence voices they usually do it in and deliberate and informed fashion. I’m sure @orenwolf, one of our moderators here, would be glad to address your concerns in that regard.
Again, we’re talking specifically here about white supremacists, incels, Nazis, tankies, etc. I negatively characterise them because I disagree with them, and I disagree with them because (again) their violence-infused ideas have been fully discredited.
Give us an example of the kind of people whose voices you’re worried would be squelched to the disadvantage of us all.
True, but is a bit weird how even today the Hollywood Blacklist is made out to be a horrible tragedy. A lot of blacklisted screenwriters were literal Stalinists – maybe the studios kind had a point in not wanting to work with such people.
The Hollywood blacklist was a horrible tragedy because the bulk of it was made up of people who were not hardcore Stalinists but (to give a few examples) people who happened to attend cocktail parties hosted by Communists (not all of them Stalinists), people whose names were named by others looking to get off the blacklist, social justice activists for minorities and women, union organisers, Communists who’d renounced Stalin after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and people who were called (I’m not making this up) “premature anti-fascists.”
Some of those people committed suicide, others lost their families, others were put out of work for a decade or more. So yes, the broad dragnets cast by McCarthy and HUAC did result in a horrible tragedy (not to mention a real danger to liberal democracy in the U.S.), however much conservatives and Libertarians would prefer to re-write history.
Define “a lot”… and let’s not forget that the Soviets dominated the global communist movement, and not accepting that meant you were alienated from the movement. And let’s also not forget that what we know NOW about Stalin wasn’t fully common knowledge. Not an excuse, but the fact that there was plenty of anti-communist propaganda, it was much easier to turn a blind eye to his brutality than it is now that we know the full horror of his regime. Last, it was the age of fascism as well, and one seemed like a worse solution than the other to the problems of the age - the depression, given that at the time the Soviet union had jobs and economic growth, and didn’t publicly trade on racism and antisemitism.
Well, the American Communist Party was a Moscow-aligned one that, as you said, expelled Trotskyists and other heretics, so certainly the card carrying members of the party were Stalinists by definition. And yes, the full horror of the regime wasn’t clear until later, although Orwell and Koestler knew what was going on. As to not publicly trading on racism and antisemitism, well, certainly not to the degree Fascism did, but non-Russians and Jews (aka “rootless cosmopolitans”) were often blamed for crimes and conspiracies against the State and were often forcibly relocated thousands of miles from their homes.
Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign was a post-war one that roughly co-incided with the McCarthy witch hunts, which themselves were conspicuously unconcerned with anti-Semitism (when they weren’t outright embracing it). The Hollywood blacklist in particular was an expression of conservative WASP politicians’ mistrust of mainly Jewish studio heads to “do the right thing” about Communists.
This is a good popular history of the Hollywood blacklist and its terrible and tragic results:
It’s not just card carrying hard core Stalinists that were targeted, though, as @gracchus notes. Fellow travelers were also targeted. That doesn’t even get into the larger campaign in other areas of American life (academia and government jobs especially) where LBGQT people were targeted specifically because they were gay.
The black list and the lavender scare were not anything positive in American life, given the number of people who suffered. The realities of the Soviet Union and the reach of Stalin during this period really didn’t justify it as much as it provided cover for purging people who the government found uncomfortable.
Again, not at all correct. If the platform is specifically monetizing based on the content being put on their publishing platform, they are publishers.
Listen, I work in the media industry. I know a thing or two about it. I work with some of the biggest publishers out there, both in print and online media. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and the like are publishers. Again, it’s kind of a fact whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
Do you have direct expertise in the world of publishing you are drawing on for your perspective?
My expertise is in tech and technology. And the law does not back you up. These companies currently operate under exclusions that shield them from publisher laws. Therefore, they operate as platforms and yet have the right to curate their content due to these exclusions. Whether or not they are abusing that power will be a matter for the courts to take up, and it may change their classification.
You may want to believe something, and your experience may make you inclined to think that. The law tells us differently.
That is a very… limited view, of the role of publishers. Indeed, theirs is primarily a distributive roll. Pressing a button does not really maker you a publisher, although many people seem to feel it does these days. LOL
LOL “the law” used to say black people were worth 3/5ths of a white. I frankly could give shit about what “the law” has to say about the nuanced role of publishing in the early 21st Century. There is a reality beyond the words of the law, IMHO.
Wow, did you really just compare slavery to determining if internet companies are publishers? Please check your hyperbole at the door. And I frankly couldn’t give a shit (notice the conjunction) what you think of the law. Hell, I might even agree with you on this topic. But wanting something to be some way doesn’t make it so, no matter how hard you wish it.
Is it for tankies? I was curious and went down the front page just now, and saw nothing but ultra-low-effort memes. It kinda seems like Reddit just picked a left-wing joke sub no one really cares about as a sop to right-wingers crying oppression.
The left wing subs that I read considered it to be where the left wing edgelords went to claim that Stalin didn’t do anything wrong. They don’t consider it’s quarantine a great loss, if they consider it a loss at all.
Well, it’s a lot more accurate to say that “a lot” of the blacklisted screenwriters and other industry figures were NOT Stalinists, literal or otherwise. Any number of them weren’t even communists in any sense at all. That’s part of why blacklists tend to be bad things: even if you can defend the central purpose, they’re inevitably used like a shotgun where a scalpel is called for.
I mean, we have blacklists today, in the form of sexual offender registries. Let’s say we all agree that rapists (to take one example) should be on such a registry. But maybe there’s a class of people (topless female political protestors) who are included for reasons that are technically valid (“indecent exposure” is on the list) but morally wrong. And let’s say that down the line a bunch of people are retroactively added to the list for things we don’t currently consider sexual offenses (e.g., posting to degenerate filth sites like this). And then let’s say a bunch of people with Jewish names are added to the sex-offender list at some point because a given list-keeper doesn’t like Jews. That’s a lot closer to how blacklists worked during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s than what you’re describing.
MGM doesn’t have to hire Joe Stalin, Jr. to write the screenplay for Guys and Dolls if it doesn’t want to, especially if his pitch is that he’s going to reimagine Nathan Detroit as a revolutionary proletariat hero struggling against bourgeoisie oppression. But that’s not how the blacklist actually worked.
