Comment on My mom really love NBC Good News tonight. How come there isn't a show where they report on the good news of the day instead of all the bad crap all the time?

• Tiresia@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.

  The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.

  Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.

  Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.

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  • vsg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Also, many of the platforms doing this speech control often allow not-so-family-friendly advertisement. YouTube, for example, doesn’t allow a sex education channel to show female nipples, but an AI-generated borderline pornographic ad for a fake game is A-okay.

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