• comfy@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

    I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

    Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

    Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.