Posted on 06/13/2019 9:44:09 AM PDT by Heartlander
More and more conservatives are saying, Let’s build our own social media platforms, to combat censorship on the existing ones. Whether that’s feasible, I don’t know. But let’s suppose that happened and it worked. Would it be good? I doubt it.
Here’s why. Imagine a conservative Twitter alternative. Call it Cwitter for short. Who would use it? And who would still use the original Twitter? The answer is obvious. People on the right would talk to each other on Cwitter, but hardly anyone else. The original Twitter would still attract everyone from just right of center all the way to the Leftist edge. These are the people who already wield the microphone that reaches most of America. Cwitter would be internet flyover country, irrelevant to all the “real” discussion.
Given a new, right-of-center social media startup, a scenario like that is too likely to ignore. And it sounds all too similar to what happened within conservative Protestantism a century ago. J. P. Moreland tells the story in Love Your God With All Your Mind. Liberal, skeptical theology was on the rise, fueled by German “Higher Criticism” and the Darwinian challenge to natural theology. Conservative scholars, feeling unwelcome in the older schools yet hoping to maintain a bulwark of truth, opened conservative colleges and seminaries.
Arguably, they succeeded in that. But in the process, they disconnected themselves from the main currents of scholarship. They may have been strong in theology, but they became irrelevant to virtually all other intellectual pursuits. And this sent the message that theology — and God himself — had nothing to say about the questions of the day.
Now we know that they never needed to retreat in the first place. In philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics and more, conservative believers are taking center stage again. I see encouraging signs even in biology, the most God-resistant field among the sciences.
Not that the parallel is perfect between then and now. Theological conservatives weren’t literally being censored, shut down, mouths taped shut, in mainstream institutions a century ago. They left for other reasons. Maybe they weren’t welcomed. They might have been shunned. Maybe they even left for fear of being intellectually overwhelmed. They faced an imbalance of power in the institution, but it wasn’t nearly as total and absolute as it can be in social media today.
And yet for all the good Christian colleges and conservative schools of theology have done — which is plenty — there’s a sense in which they really did back out of the intellectual conversation of the day. They quit. At a time when they could still have shown up in the journals and the conferences, if not in the classrooms, they walked away. They could have fought the fight where it needed to be fought, but they pulled aside to their own private conversations instead.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook aren’t exactly the most inviting homes for deep intellectual colloquy. (YouTube can be, if you look hard enough for it, but you have to know where.) So again, the parallelism isn’t perfect.
Still, even though Twitter and Facebook aren’t hotbeds of scholarship, they’re still home to a major part of American discussion. That’s why I worry that establishing a separate, parallel Cwitter would be too much like cwitting — er, quitting. The same principle applies to Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and any others.
That doesn’t mean I have an ideal solution to the question raised by private businesses practicing censorship. It’s a new problem and a difficult one.
But we must resist as much as possible, as long as possible, any recommendation to let ourselves be pushed aside. We’re not flyover thinkers. We don’t belong in some separate-but-equal, walled-off social media universe. And we can do no good for the overall conversation if we let our part of it be shunted off to a side room.
Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream, and the author of A Christian Mind: Thoughts on Life and Truth in Jesus Christ and Critical Conversations: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens, and the lead editor of True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism.
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The thing is, we DID build our own platforms. These Communists built nothing on their own - they took over the institutions we built.
The people who built our tech infrastructure were overwhelmingly libertarian. The Left had no interest in any of it until it became successful.
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
- Frank Herbert Children of Dune
The platform is not important. It’s the texts that are.
Massive texting ability, rather than networking or seeing others’ texts on a single site, are most important.
gab.ai - closed system - can’t see anything unless you register/login
mewe.com - closed system - can’t see anything unless you register/login
parler - closed system - can’t see anything unless you register/login
https://www.ts.today (Jordan Peterson’s ThinkSpot)- closed system - subscription based
Basically conservatives are locking themselves in a room while proclaiming Free Speech.
A "conservative" media platform might be a flop, but one with minimal censorship -- and ZERO political censorship -- would likely be a success.
Should there be a conservative phone company, a conservative internet service provider, a conservative letter and package delivery service, a conservative bank card and payment company too?
I just thought off something- do ya remember when dear leader said “You didn’t build that”?
Well, if that’s the case, facebook and twitter belong to everyone, and WE set the rules! So let’s start firing everyone- and hiring new help to run those sites!
Almost every conservative principle I hold actually stands on its own in the real world. When it comes to politically contentious issues, I've reached the point where I'm more interested in letting people fail than in showing them how to succeed.
I hope Twitter and Facebook are filled with losers like this before long:
The bastards would hound the ISP that hosts the site and claim racism, homophobia, hate speech, etc. So the site must be hosted by normal humans, not wimpy faced social justice warriers.
It ain't rocket science. And it can't be set up as an echo chamber exclusively for like-thinking people. It needs to reach out to everyone and allow misguided people to have the opportunity to receive a conservative or libertarian perspective.
The only reason I was on twitter is that I liked to mock and insult celebrities.
Liberals got me twitter banned for life twice
Nazis got me banned from Gab. I don’t react well to bullying.
Good points. Im ready to sign up but there are no viable alternatives.
If you think any site has to stay on the top of the heap just because it’s currently the king of the hill, I have two words for you;
myspace -> facebook
Here, let’s try two more;
yahoo -> google
How about something more recent and still occurring;
skype -> discord
All you really have to do is be better, easier, more fun, or sometimes you just have to catch a little bit of good luck in how you end up catching the attention of popular internet culture.... usually a combination of all of the above.
There is absolutely NOTHING that says Twitter wont get surpassed. No facebook.
What the author doesn’t get is that you can do both. You can continue fighting them in their arena while also having your own sanctuary to take comfort and strength from.
When you’re in a war it’s good to have your own safe zone.
A platform is either commercial advertising based or it is subscription based. We cannot compete in the open with subscription based platforms. Major companies won’t advertise on conservative platforms until they are big and they won’t be big until they get advertising because corporate America fears the Left and panders to the Left for good reason and would lose liberal customers wholesale if it advertised on conservative platforms. Conservatives buy what they want regardless of the politics of the seller. Liberals make a “statement” every time they buy socks or a car. That shoves sellers into making mucho leftist propaganda and shunning of conservative web activity.
But Twitter and Facebook are also closed systems.
Before FOX and before Limbaugh and before AON and O’Reily and Hannity...... nobody thought of the need for conservative TV and conservative radio and conservative voices all over the airwaves and over the internet.
So, what happened? FOX was built, and THEY CAME. It became the most successful of all the cable news networks around. Some would way that is was/is more successful than the over-the-air TV network news (ABC/CBS/NBC).
So, why not follow the same path towards building the conservative internet (not just competitors for Twitter and Google and Facebook and Instagram, etc). If FOX was able to do it, I’m pretty sure that the conservative internet can also overtake (in due time) the liberal internet. After all, most people are NOT LIBERAL and there are more conservatives and libertarians around than democrats. It’s just a matter of having the courage and the means to get it done.
BTW, CWitter is a no-no for a name.
Alynsky rule #4...
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Sad but true.
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