by Chris Black
Censorship has done a few things:
- Makes people suspicious things are being hidden from them
- Makes people more resentful of the regime and more open to conspiracies which portrays the regime as an irredeemably malevolent entity
- Forces more and more moderate dissenters/conservatives into sandboxes with more radical voices and conspiracy theorists, thereby exposing them to perspectives they wouldn’t see if they were still just using Facebook.
And therefore:
- Gives more credibility to radicals and conspiracy theorists. If just Alex Jones is censored it might be reasonable to think he’s a crazy crank. If Alex Jones and you and all your friends are censored that lends to his credibility.
Additionally, it exacerbates polarisation by forcing people into political echo chambers and turning existing platforms into libtard echo chambers.
The regime’s only solution to these trends is yet more censorship.
At the same time more people are adopting more dissident/radical positions due to the factors above, the regime is expanding what’s considered extreme to try and snuff out gateway positions.
This has created a feedback loop of more censorship leading to more breakdowns in trust to more polarisation to more censorship.
We’re in a credibility cascade failure.
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