Huh? It's the exact opposite. In the US sites like Facebook & Twitter routinely refuse to censor conservative content even if it is against their policies because they are afraid of pissing off Republicans in Congress.
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
I could bet money that the opposite of what you're saying is true. But I think that illustrates a much bigger problem. The society is so polarized, that we can't even agree on basic facts. Something went terribly wrong with the internet and the media and now we're living in two completely different realities, that are fundamentally incompatible with one another.
Yes I think Facebook allowed the Fauci threats as PR to make themselves look neutral. Mark Zuckerberg and his employees have been playing good cop bad cop with us since the beginning to make the public perceive Facebook as a neutral bystander when in fact they're in a large part responsible for the whole mess and are not neutral at all.
You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.
I think that the right has moved the Overton Window so much to the right that they see things that most of the world would see as mainstream (Black Lives Matter, Abortion, Medicare for All, Defund the Police, Anti-Fascism etc) as extreme.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the criticisms of those. You might also want to familiarize yourself with what those organizations and ideologies are actually about beyond their slogan (which in most cases has nothing to do with what the slogan is).
But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.
That's funny that you say that because those who find themselves right of center generally say the same thing. The mainstream media, hollywood, and academia, have become so liberal that the center feels like extreme right to them.
A number of countries have ripped up their police force and started again, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last few decades. The RUC would be a mild case, the Stasi an extreme one.
None of those things, properly understood[1], were in any way mainstream until very recently. And arguably still aren't mainstream.
[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".
And the fact that people apparently can’t stand to hear this shows how far left the tech overton window has shifted. As if we all were not already aware.
That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable. If you describe those things are mainstream, they're by definition inside the Overton Window. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you're more likely to be fired for being a nationalist rather than a communist, so that's another indicator that the Overton Window is actually on the left.
I'm not the one you're replying to, but here's how I think the Overton Window works.
Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.
For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.
Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)
The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.
> That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable
"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.
Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".
I don't keep track of this, but there is a lot of "canceling" going on recently. If we talk strictly about politics, I did saw a couple of left-leaning people who got fired for politics, because the angry mob went after their employment. But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people. And what I never saw was anyone on the left got kicked off platforms like PayPal for example. Though it's within the realm of possibility that the social media just gave me the impression that this is the case. However, considering the fact that basically every corporation and even some of the smaller companies are changing their logos in support of BLM, LGBT Pride etc., I think it's quite reasonable to assume that.
> But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people.
And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?
Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.
Since my experience is the complete political reverse of what you describe (liberals getting away with things that conservatives assume they never could), I think the real answer is that probably there is less censorship in general than people assume.
And I suppose that's probably a good thing.
> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.
However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.
Are you intentionally trying to gaslight people? This is just straight up false. See Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trump - a tweet which she’s retweeted multiple times.
OP is probably referring to the Steve Bannon's recent statement calling for the beheading of Dr. Fauci. This has been very widely covered, even by Trumpist media. See:
This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.