What chills me the most, is the self-censorship Americans engage on social media today, everywhere online. It seems Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship and more "taboo" topics, and I'm guessing it's because the platforms kind of shadow-ban people quickly for it.

Growing up, I always heard Americans bragging about freedom of speech, and how important it is. I'll admit I swallowed that wholesale as a young impressionable person in another country, and I still believe in it, just not the American freedom of speech flavor I suppose. But it's so sad to see the state of affairs compared to just ten years ago, where discussions could be freely held, even on mainstream social media, and people weren't afraid of talking about things with clear words.

But the chilling effect is in full effect today, and I think it's having a large impact on how well (or not) the working class could actually mobilize. Because as soon as anyone mentions "general strike" on social media, they seem to disappear into a black hole and that stuff never shows up in people's feeds. Regardless of the size of the labor pool, if you can't organize people somehow, especially across a large country like the US, it's short of impossible to actually get any change in reality.

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jandrewrogers an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Americans don't talk about "general strikes" because they don't care about general strikes and never really have. That concept doesn't have a place in American culture. I know socialists keep trying to make it salient but that is like trying to impose democracy on Afghanistan.

You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship

Americans are talking about protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship all the time ... and I mean literally all sides - liberals, conservatives, leftists, feminists, MAGA ...

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Using what words specifically? Besides HN, even people commenting on reddit tends to self-censor words like "r@pe" just because they've realized they get penalized if they talk about things too clearly, on other platforms. Same with general strikes, censorship and more, even on platforms where you don't get downranked automatically just because you used specific terms, people have now started self-censor in those ways.

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applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "r@pe"

Whenever you see something like this, it's because the platform has some kind of automoderation policy that is liable to delete/shadowban content containing the word. Typing that, then, is not self-censorship; it's the exact opposite, the defiance of external censorshop.

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astura 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>people commenting on reddit tends to self-censor words like "r@pe"

That's just because reddit is almost entirely children and bots/shills. Yes, a platform full of children is going to be childish.

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not talking specifically about reddit...

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Using the example of someone typing “r@pe” to get around auto moderation is a pretty specific complaint, and not really an example of self censorship since that person clearly still got to say whatever they wanted to say. At least online, there is a decent argument to be made that a good cohort of people have significantly lost the ability to self moderate.