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I think that, in a nutshell, leftoid attempts to censor rightoids failed. 4chan, cultural driver of much of the Internet, reached critical mass and for some reason never got shut down. Trump was a disappointment for committed rightoids but made being a rightoid fun again. Musk buying Twitter was the follow-up blow. Genuine rightoids are running wild over the Internet and grifter non-genuines have also come in, sensing a niche. Rightoids are winning at meme warfare because they care less about propriety and current year moral norms than leftoids do, which makes them better at making people laugh, plus since the majority of widespread modern culture war taboos on free discussion of reality are leftoid, rightoids have the advantage of somewhat more often being the ones who are puncturing bullshit in favor of truth. Which is not to say that rightoids wouldn't turn into censorious authoritarians if they somehow got power, they absolutely would try to do that. But for now the situation is as I have described. Moderates and rightoids who fled censorship managed to fight back and even, more or less, to make their own Internet. I can't think of any effective way for leftoids to fight back without somehow managing to impose China-level censorship, and they do not have enough social capital for that. Even Russia, which is an authoritarian shithole, still has an Internet that is connected to the rest of the world's Internet and where loads of people criticize the government. I doubt that the Internet will be successfully censored in the US at any time in the near future.
That's what I thought was happening in 2016. Then "anti-SJW" content got replaced by communism, best personified by Ethan Klein of h3h3 removing his podcast with Jordan Peterson, apologizing for it, and then making Hasan Poker a co-host. A safe edgy variant of the left won the youth. Or so I thought.
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"Did not succeed at the 100% level" is not "failed".
One could argue in this particular case, less that total censorship is worse than nothing.
Sure life has been hard for the Based Brigade and kiwis have to constantly hop from one host to the next, but ultimately a right wing counter-elite is forming and the left is now more divided and on a worse footing than the right, which is precisely what the censorship was trying to prevent.
Time will tell if this means anything to the status quo, but I'm allowing myself vain Thermidorian hopes at this point.
I'm not sure I'm seeing it. The landscape would look a lot different if social media were still a free for all. Even if it all ultimately falls apart for the left, these few years allowed them to hold on to the young Millenials and Zoomers long enough to convince them they're anti-establishment even as they have full support from every major institution. What you're describing is a lot closer to 2014-2017 than it is to today, which is why the establishment freaked out so much back then.
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