The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Corporate Censorship: A Short History of the Social Media Thought Police Regime

Posted on | June 14, 2019 | Comments Off on Corporate Censorship: A Short History of the Social Media Thought Police Regime

 

In the sidebar, Ace of Spades beats Ben Shapiro like a rented mule:

Now that YouTube is deplatforming conservatives who don’t tow the line on the sexual left’s zero-tolerance-for-anything-less-than-complete-validation agenda on homosexuality and transgenderism, Ben Shapiro — who, oh yeah, makes a lot of money from YouTube — suddenly has a problem with the left’s deplatforming campaign.
What happened to Muh Private Business, Not-Binary Ben? Did the Muh Private Business mantra stop being sacred when the censors started knocking on your neighbor’s door?
Hey, remember when a lot of us told you that the alligator would soon come for you, licking its chops? But you were still content to feed the alligator your rivals and competitors?

The link is to Twitchy, where Sarah Desprat-Reed says of the “standards” by which YouTube justified demonetizing Steven Crowder:

The “standard” seems to be “hate speech is any speech I don’t like.” . . .
If YouTube’s going to crack down on so-called “egregious actions,” that’s fine. But they’d better be able to explain why “egregious actions” are only egregious when conservatives do them.

Leaving aside Ace’s grudge against Shapiro — the feud has lasted longer than the Mueller investigation — let’s ask: How did we get here?

The current era of social-media censorship can be traced back to #GamerGate, which feminists and other SJWs claimed was about “misogynist” harassment. That’s what inspired the creation of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council with totalitarian ideologue Anita Sarkeesian in February 2016, a week before my @rsmccain account was banned.

 

That ban was justified under Twitter’s recently promulgated prohibition on “targeted harassment” although, as was pointed out at the time, no one ever said who was “targeted” or how they’d been “harassed” in my case. Someone in authority at Twitter had evidently decided to make an example of me and, while there was general consternation among conservatives and libertarians at the time, this was forgotten a few months later when Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos. What seems to have happened next was that in November 2016, after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, everybody in Big Tech bought into the Democrats’ claim that online “fake news” and Russian “bot” accounts explained Hillary’s loss. Quite suddenly, any social-media behavior the Left didn’t like was “hate” and “fascism” and, especially after the August 2017 Charlottesville riot, this mentality led to increased censorship. Among the major-media “journalists” who encouraged the expansion of this Orwellian Thought Police regime was CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

Everybody who’s followed this story can name their own reference points in the saga, but two that stood out for me were, first, the firing of James Damore from Google in August 2017, and second, Amazon’s ban on pickup artist Roosh V’s books in September 2018. Now, nearly five years after the #GamerGate controversy erupted, we have reached the point where Carlos Maza (an employee of NBC-subsidized Vox) can succeed in getting YouTube to punish one of his critics: “We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.”

Ah, “a pattern of egregious actions” — keep it nice and vague, eh?

What has happened, essentially, is that after decades of left-wing dominance of academia, younger members of the college-educated class (including journalists and tech-company workers) are overwhelmingly “progressive,” which is to say they are not only Democrat voters, but monomaniacally obsessed with certain ideas, which leads them to engage in virtue-signalling by accusing others of Thought Crimes. They seek to “win” arguments by silencing opposition.

“Twitter Is Now Banning Conservatives For Investigative Journalism About Big Tech’s Abortion Activism” is the latest headline from Madeline Osburn at The Federalist. There was a time when most Christian conservatives seemed inclined to ignore the censorship directed at various “alt-right” types. However, if people like Milo, Roosh and Alex Jones weren’t the kind of polite folks the Religious Right was apt to defend, it was predictable that once these rowdy voices were purged, that next the Thought Police would extend their reach. Crowder is not Alex Jones, and Lila Rose is not Milo Yiannopoulos, but all of them are viewed as enemies by the progressive Thought Police. There is no safe harbor where “respectable” conservatives can enjoy freedom of speech.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

In related news, PJMedia is now being blacklisted by Pinterest — because nudity? — and tech billionaire Naval Ravikant says, “The Left won the culture wars. Now they’re just driving around shooting survivors.”

UPDATE II: Oh, yeah, did I mention somebody’s got a book out?



 

Category: Ace of Spades, Blogging, Culture

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