The US is not even close to totalitarian. Even China, a far more repressive state, is not totalitarian. Totalitarian governments are those that are so authoritarian that they control just about all aspects of life of the residents. Only Eritrea and North Korea fit the bill in today's world.

Yes, OP has a point, but his characterisation of the US is not accurate.

> There might be no future one at all, particularly not under the current administration.

If "browser history" is even on your radar when responding to a claim like this, things may not be as bad as you think they are.

From the inside, the rest of the world looks like either anarchy or arbitrary despotism. Do you care what Americans think of you? That's how Americans feel about your opinion. It's just simply irrelevant.

Consider looking beyond the most sensationalized news coverage.

From the inside (UK -> US immigrant), it is really bad right now. From an American perspective, maybe it is not so bad as we think because of the difference in 'overton windows'. We now have the president essentially demanding the criminalization of left wing politics, and there is a large contingent of support in the Republican base, gorged on misinformation, frothing at the mouth at the prospect of throwing anyone to the left in Gitmo. Considering that the politics of most of Europe are considered to be communism by many in the US, it's worrying to say the least. The US is very clearly, very openly sliding into a degenerate fascist state.

Less developed countries where most things will pass are highly underrated. People have incentives to work it out for themselves. Although the bureaucratic state might be enormous on paper, in practice freedom fills the void where there is no enforcement.

Of course there are downsides as well, but you learn how to work it.

Then there is also the cost of living.

> That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance.

This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic.

It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.

I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.

>That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

So the solution to reddit's partisan and out of touch politics is to consume more of it, but make sure that you have a good cross section of dumb viewpoints?

I have a better suggestion: find political insight literally anywhere other than reddit. It's a naive place with all the perspective and context of a 15 year old first discovering the world and trying to express opinions about it.

Lots of subreddits will ban you if you post on a subreddit they don’t like..

Past totally apolitical random subs like /ski it is just silly. Reading stuff right now going on about US protests I can easily see how anyone with 2 brain cells can write a bot that will creat posts driving certain agenda. If you have few hundred minimum wage posters on staff and some tools it should be really trivial to creat a lot of shit

I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone. What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs.

These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care.

It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.

To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views.

This post pretty much sums up T_D:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thno...

It's a monolith in terms of ideology and content, they face no challenges in terms of managing tensions within its community of users.

I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.

> with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity.

Who's saying that? That's very much not what section 230 says. And as a change to the law to do this would eliminate all social networks (along with newspaper comment sections and similar) it is highly unlikely to ever go anywhere.

Section 230 is essentially about the ability to quote someone else without fact checking or taking responsibility for what was said. It has nothing to do with neutrality and never had anything to do with neutrality until recent efforts to manufacture outrage started conflating Section 230 and the entirely unrelated concept of free speech.

> any moderation makes them liable as a publisher

Quite a lot of moderation is required either by law or other forms of liability. And then you have the international jurisdiction question: if a social media platform removes posts to comply with French or German anti-Nazi law, or UK defamation law, does that make them liable under s230?