> Then about ten years ago things changed.

No, they didn't.

We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons had a public feud with George Bush Sr.

Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it predates humans; plenty of other species kick antisocial members out of group gatherings.

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mrighele 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes they did. I am talking about the Internet.

It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet. If it was something illegal sooner or later the state FBI/a Judge/Whatever would come for you, but it was a matter between you and the law. Your Internet provider, your hosting provider, etc. couldn't care less because they were not involved in your activity, in the same way that the post office is not to blame if you send an explosive letter using their service.

That's Section 230. While it's an USA-specific law it was in the spirit followed also in most of the other Western countries.

	▲	ceejayoz 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet. This was never the case. We had occasional law enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by default until well into the 2000s (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep). Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters. It made it safer to host potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale, not harder.