U.S. government websites have gone dark as agencies scrambled to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring his administration would recognize only two genders and ordering an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      4 hours ago

      Already done.

      Social media is basically the internet for most of the population, and the biggest ones by far (Meta, Timtok) prostrated themselves.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        4 hours ago

        “Already done” it was when most people were on social media. It’s a self-supporting censorship machine requiring no government intervention. Censorship is usually defined as government censorship, and a private business on their platform has right to do whatever they want about speech. And that’s fine when those private businesses are physical diners, rented spaces for events and so on. But if there were 2 or 3 owners of all the spaces you can rent to have a meeting, and those would have policy on speech, you’d have effective non-governmental censorship IRL. Same with the Internet.

        Then platform owners do that censorship simply because they can and it’s convenient too.

        Whatever governments order them comes much later and doesn’t change much. We already have censorship for 10-15 years, affecting all we do.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          57 seconds ago

          Thank you.

          The problem isn’t that Meta and X and TikTok censor content…it never has been…that’s entirely within their rights, as businesses, to do.

          The problem is that these 2-3 companies, run by 2-3 people with strong political allegiances and bottomless pocketbooks, control nearly every beer hall, Elks Lodge, KoC, and corner-grocer corkboard, in the world.

          One of the biggest ways our government failed us was by letting these companies get so damn big and influencial.

          The founders, while themselves wealthy slave-owning pieces of shit, did have some good ideas…but I don’t think they ever expected there to be just a couple of unelected private businessmen in charge of every soapbox in the country.

          Oh, and also all of the press.

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.mlEnglish
      14·
      9 hours ago

      last year when a number of states started to effectively ban adult content.

      -You could also argue it happened a lot sooner over a decade back when every high traffic website started transforming into a walled garden.

      • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        11 hours ago

        Yeah, but I mean things like fediverse banned, web archive and Wikipedia blocked, liberal news outlets blocked, etc.

        I give it another year or two, tops, but I feel like it’s coming.

        • PerogiBoi@lemmy.caEnglish
          4·
          3 hours ago

          I have a Facebook page where I posted lots of links to peertube videos. I get an error each time I post another peertube video and the thumbnails don’t show up anymore.

          They’re already banning fediverse content.

        • Echo DotEnglish
          61·
          10 hours ago

          You think anyone in the Trump administration knows about Lemmy. I feel like they hardly even knew about Twitter.