The War On Dissent — Bitcoin Magazine

This arti­cle orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Bit­coin Mag­a­zine’s “Cen­sor­ship Resis­tant Issue.” To get a copy, vis­it our store.

Online cen­sor­ship is becom­ing increas­ing­ly nor­mal­ized as grow­ing restric­tions, deplat­form­ing and its oth­er man­i­fes­ta­tions have become so per­va­sive that many have sim­ply come to accept it. This “new nor­mal” for free speech is as insid­i­ous as it has been grad­ual, as we are increas­ing­ly being trained to accept uncon­sti­tu­tion­al lim­i­ta­tions on what we can express on the web­sites that dom­i­nate online social­iza­tion. Like so much of our lives, social inter­ac­tion has moved online at a rapid pace in the last decade, mean­ing that restric­tions imposed upon online speech have a dis­pro­por­tion­ate effect on speech in general.