In less than a decade, the internet went from free and open to one of the most heavily moderated spaces in public life. Beginning in 2015, every major platform created strict, but extremely vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation and censorship apparatus. NGOs, the US government, and foreign actors (notably, the EU) helped. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on speech policing, which often went by the Orwellian term “trust and safety.” The scale of censorship has no precedent. Tens of millions of accounts were suppressed or banned. Billions of posts were removed. A professional historian could spend their entire career chronicling it. McCarthyism is taught in schools, and online censorship of the 2010s is orders of magnitude larger than McCarthyism ever was. Here, a full history chronicling exactly how major platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook) silenced dissident speech, from @arctotherium42 👇