Hitler’s character has been going through a revival of sorts amongst right wing white nationalists. You can find such posts on X.com. Threads doesn’t want that on their platform. They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted. This will lead to things like what Texas tried to implement regarding social media platforms. Easiest course of action is to ban all mentions of Hitler.
In the 1980s a very few percent of people admired Hitler or sought to bring about a revival of his image. There is a mainstreaming of this revival. What is happening now is a normalization of the idea that perhaps he wasn’t all that bad. That he had the right idea to some extent. The center of the country has shifted greatly to the right. People who normally would not be right wing nationalists had the center not shifted are now right wing nationalists.
When I wrote there is a mainstreaming I meant that there is an attempt to make it mainstream. There are conservatives who say they’d rather vote for a rapist felon than a liberal. It’s an attempt to normalize certain viewpoints. I.E. voting for Hitler is better than voting for a liberal. The idea is that the worst of us is better than the best of you type mentality.
The approach is ridiculous, though. Again, it's a word ban. When someone bans the word from being mentioned do you say "awww shucks guess I'm not going to be a white nationalist anymore?" No, you start saying Vitler instead and move on.
> They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted.
One way to handle it is to stop fucking tampering with everyone's feeds. Then, if someone doesn't follow people who spout white nationalist gibberish, they won't get said gibberish in their feed. But no! That's not right! We have to show people things they don't follow to drive engagement and in the process effectively introduce algorithms that tamper. The end result is everyone wants the algorithm to tamper how they think it should.
Any social media company engaging in this tampering should be regulated, chastised, and/or systematically dismantled. But that doesn't happen, because people engage more when you show them things they never wanted to see in the first place, and engagement drives profit, and profit drives capital. And doing anything to upset capital is heresy.
They are in the position of not wanting pro-Hitler sentiments on their site. They also don’t want conservatives, who are now in power, to punish them. It seems like a reasonable decision to just ban the word altogether. It’s expedient; not ideal.
