MountDoom
4 hours ago
Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999?
In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.
But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.