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stray thought about winter. idk how bad it's gonna get, but. governments will probably react to any hint of instability by locking down social media hard and the firms will surely comply if asked maybe worth getting contact info of mutuals and saying hi to meatspace neighbors

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I think I'd be wiling to bet against this, do u wanna pick a concrete prediction and put $20 on it

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which part would you want to bet against? a hard winter or actions to constrain or censor social media in the event of political instability?

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i think "governments will probably react to any hint of instability by locking down social media hard" maybe its hard to put a finger on it, but what would be an example of instability, and what would be an example of locking down social media hard

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yeah its tricky to get more concrete motivating examples are - covid era misinformation labeling and bannings - mass simultaneous deplatforming of the NY post and the hunter biden story in 2020 - cloudflare dropping DDOS protections to disfavored groups - operation choke point

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abstracting from this, it seems like a toolkit for cutting off specific individuals or groups of individuals or web sites, and hard, already exists and social media companies are happy to comply with "requests" for scaled censorship-lite, and they are able to do this

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but yeah all of this is rather indirect seems unlikely to me that government would act by fiat, im imagining instead simply a plausibly decentralized campaign of demonization and deplatforming that just happened to be simultaneous and all in one direction

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Ar-Zimraphel

@Ar_Zimraphel

Sep 7, 2022

Replying to @eigenrobot and @Aella_Girl

Possible problem: the government is going to pretend they're not as involved as they are (because that shit's illegal), and it'll take a while for the truth to come out. So how do you resolve the bet in the meantime?