It’s a need, like alcohol and tobacco

Two things that demonstrably haven’t grown more popular when they’ve been made less accessible, despite those restrictions not having 100% success rate.

And although I don’t fundamentally object to any of them, calling alcohol, tobacco and pornography a “need” just makes you sound like even more of a child.

I don’t see how blocking porn and weed is a winning strategy.

Then you’re giving the people involved far more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. They’re far-right extremists. It’s not hollow rhetoric or exaggeration, they’re here and they’re passing laws.

If you disregard the excuses that come out of their mouths, this is perfectly aligned with the far-right ideology that has infested the Republican party.

Groups like the Proud Boys, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan and incessant fuckwits like Jordan Peterson all openly promote giving up jerking off and routinely make pseudoscientific claims about it increasing your testosterone, therefore making you more of a man.

They’re also working hard to broaden the term “pornography” to include anything that acknowledges any sexuality other than “straight” and any form of gender expression that doesn’t clearly broadcast what genitals you have. This allows them to attack teachers and authors that dare say anything that isn’t right wing.

Weed is essentially the same story as it’s always been. It was made illegal so police could target “undesirables” like black people, hippies, jazz musicians and women who wanted to be more than a source of hot meals and warm holes for a middle class husband.

Literally the only thing they changed was updating the left-wing stereotypes.

Pornography access seems very close to people’s heart in here but the claim “it won’t decrease viewership, probably increase it” has zero chance of being true.

However insignificant it might be, any amount of faff will lower participation and there isn’t a single person in the world thinking “I don’t watch pornography or allow my children to watch pornography but now the gubbermint is involved we’re going to do nothing else but watch smut”.

There are so many shit takes in this thread that I have to assume they’re from children upset about their pornography being cut off.

People who abuse and manipulate their family also have social media, which they use to abuse and manipulate society.

They’re a certain type of person and for a lot of people, social media is their first real experience with these patterns of behaviour that were usually hidden behind closed doors.

But for anyone who grew up in an abusive home and broke the cycle, it’s instantly recognisable.

The tricks and motivations don’t change. They want to dictate how everyone around them looks, acts and thinks. If anybody gets it wrong, they lash out at them and try to hurt them physically or emotionally.

Everything that comes out of their mouths is just a means to that end. Things like logic and consistency don’t even enter into it.

They have no qualms at all about deliberately misinterpreting “freedom of speech” so they can say what they like, then handwaving it away so they can prevent others from doing the same.

The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.

Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they’d be immediately run out of the venue, despite “angry, dissaffected, young people” being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.

When the internet did come along, initially things weren’t much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they’d “raid” other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn’t figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.

When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.

Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to “alt-right”, the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.

From there, the “mask on, hide your powerlevel” stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.

By the time Charlottesville’s swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.

Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they’d slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of “as far-right as we can get away with”. They’d move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.

But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you’d hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of “freedom of speech” any more.

Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren’t being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn’t breed more of them.

So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.

The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.