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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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There's always a question of whether a space was actively astroturfed, just became popular with certain types of folks, or was just taken over and shifted to driving out certain types of folks and being more attractive to other types of folks. I'm thinking /r/law, which prior to 2016 was a pretty good, legal-expertise-focused sub that usually didn't take the ridiculous political bait and could be pretty reasonable about what the law actually was, why, etc. It was visibly taken over by Orange Man Bad moderators who openly made it a rule that any comment that could be perceived as "helping Trump" in any way was verboten, regardless of the legal merits. The incredibly rapid descent to becoming /r/politics followed like clockwork.

The same with /r/whitepeopletwitter which was once light-hearted and funny, but mutated suddenly to 100% tubthumping for lib-left causes.

I'm off Reddit now, but when I was on, /r/law was pretty non-political up until Trump's indictments started happening. After that, it became wall-to-wall Trump-bashing and any legal analysis was biased towards seeing him lose. Completely non-objective.

It's really no different to what happened to many IRL institutions post-Trump. In fact, we should expect it to happen more because it takes vastly less effort to take over online spaces.

All it takes is someone with too much time who's imbibed the Left's idea of fighting where you are and that controlling the discourse will determine reality and, instead of running around trying to decolonize birdwatching or joining and shifting the ACLU, they just become a mod or a reply guy that harangues mods into submission.

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