Hey. Did you know that people are putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin’ frogs gay? he was booted by Apple, Facebook, Google’s YouTube and other platforms. For “hate speech.”
What’s “hate speech”? Speech not liked by progressives.
I Hate That
So Jones was booted for not being liked by progressives. Which is no difficult feat. Being unliked by progressives, that is. Joy, bonhomie, frank calm collegial openness to debate and charitable tolerance are not well known progressive traits. They’re woke, baby, and they’re going to make darn sure you know it.
According to offshore-bank-loving SPLC, it is called collusion. Why, that’s impeachable! I mean indictable. Where’s Robert Mueller when you need him?
Everybody knows Twitter bans and shadow bans non-progressive voices, including candidates for political office. Search for any non-progressive subject on Google, and then try it again on, say, Duck Duck Go. The differences show Google’s version of shadow bans.
YouTube squelches non-progressives videos, or demonitizes them. YouTube is also adding progressive propaganda to videos it considers insufficiently progressive.
Basta!
Enough! It’s time for it to end. We can no longer let these realityphobes, bigots, and general all-around humorless sourpusses say what we can see and what we can’t.
We must declare all major information-sharing companies public utilities and regulate them accordingly.
You wouldn’t stand for the electric company shutting off electricity to homes which voted for Trump, would you? Would you sit by idly while the phone company banned discussions—using the latest in “artificial intelligence” to filter live conversations—that they consider hurtful to progressive causes? Would you take lying down the water shutting off the taps in NRA offices?
Then why let Google, Apple, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter get away with it?
Answer: they shouldn’t. Let’s go after them.
Who runs your phone? I mean your cell phone. Almost certainly it’s Apple or Google. Who can deal without phones these days? Only a few; probably the same number that can live “off the grid”. Google search is used by the government itself, in many places. The news media would have to sit around and spin on their—notepads? “sources”?—if President “Thank God It’s” Trump didn’t use Twitter and provide them with fodder for their daily pretended “outrage”.
Incidentally, we ought to require licenses to practice journalism. We make doctors get them. And journalists constantly tell us they are at least as important to the health of the nation. If even barbers have to have licenses to trim sideburns, why do we let an army of lying, scheming, manipulative, agenda-driven, one-sided so-and-sos besmirch, belittle, and bedevil whomever they want with complete freedom?
They’re Everywhere
Never mind that. Look how deep the tendrils of Big Tech go. As one example out of thousands, the Food and Drug Administration, a branch of the Federal government, uses Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube to disseminate official information. All of government relies on Google to catalog their webpages. Many agencies have Facebook pages.
These services have therefore become necessary to the fluid functioning of government and society. To the great self-satisfaction of the owners of these services at that.
The tech companies got what they wanted: monopoly control over on-line information delivery. They are now powerful public utilities. With that great power comes great responsibility, to coin a phrase. They need to be taught to use it wisely.
Now I am a great sinner with many terrible faults, but one of them is not being a lawyer. So I do not know how the law applies to this situation. I do know that the second-to-the-last thing we want is another government bureaucracy dedicated to the policing of internet traffic. Though these kinds of interventions do not appear to have hurt electricity and water delivery too badly.
I also know the last thing we want is to give control of information to forces hostile to reality, tradition and orthodox religion.
Briggs, I’m not sure how much of this is satire or what you really believe. Are you off Facebook? I am (except for the Catholic Writers Guild page, and I intend to leave that shortly). Are you off Twitter? I am. Are you off Linkedin (I intend to be as soon as I finish this comment). Government control is certainly not the answer, if you are indeed serious about the public utility thing. (“I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”) There is a Catholic equivalent (equivalent in purpose, if not in size), “Awestruck TV”–look it up. I guess it’s the methadone or suboxin equivalent of Facebook for those who are addicted to social media.
Here’s the website for “Awestruck TV”
https://awestruck.tv/junction/
Yeah!
Seems legit…let’s put Deep State unelected bureaucrats in charge of the internet. They’re sure to fairly intermediate between Normals and the PC-Prog denizens of Silicon Valley.
What could go wrong?
The issues we face are much, much deeper than finding a neutral referee to keep the internet open.
We are past that–there is no chance of fair arbitration in the online marketplace of opinion.
The PC-Progs, should they be in power, would stack the Bureau of Internet Control with their glassy-eyed purveyors of Equity and Anti-fascism.
On the other hand, were Republicans in power, they’d fill up the Bureau with fake “conservatives” demanding war, war, war now and forever in the Middle East, doing Netanyahu’s bidding.
Now, President Trump could crack down on actual discrimination by the tech titans. He could just use the power of the federal purse–that is, cancel all federal contracts with service providers who discriminate based on content of legal speech.
If he could avoid creation of a Bureau, and a bureaucracy, it may be doable. But, who’ll review and analyze the incidents of discrimination? Who’ll arbitrate when the tech giants disagree?
Likely unworkable.
The deeper we plunge into the PC-Progressive nightmare future, the clearer it becomes that we are two nations living under one flag. At what point does the rending begin?
How about Alex sues FB, etc. and ultimately gets a Supreme Court decision.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Public_accommodations
https://infogalactic.com/info/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
Lawfare. It’s not just for Leftists any more.
A license to practise journalism sounds great until you imagine who’d credential the licensees. The takeover of American education by the Federal Government has not been pleasant and the outcomes appear very poor. To have a journalism license, you’d need to take the Federal test. That’d require extensive training by the Federal Government. And if you ever printed anything off the beam, there’d go your license, after an extensive talk with the Department in charge.
Let’s just apply the logic of letting Google, and it’s subsidiary YouTube, Facebook and the rest to “deplatform” InfoWars to florists and bakers “deplatforming” certain events.
In fact the only utility like regulation that seems right to me is on the ISPs, to carry IP packets to their destination. That guarantees a minimum grade of service, higher grades might be available.
Google and Facebook need to serve ads to survive. So, target their advertisers with campaigns, in particular the big ones. Use Google to target the FB advertisers, and use FB to target the big Google advertisers. Stop using them as much as possible otherwise.
Amazon is easy, don’t buy stuff there if other parties sell it too.
Twitter is easy as well, just use it to advertise the FB and Google campaigns. Do not read tweets if you can help it.
All these companies are valuable because of the network effect. So, to target them, lessen their network effects by not participating in their networks.
The kind of problem associated with monopolies has consistent anti-capitalism effects. Vi Hart has a whimsical video that illustrates this with net neutrality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UZUhRdD6U
Chances are, your understanding of Net Neutrality [if you’re one of the few that ponders this topic] is flawed if not false.
And here’s some of the tactics apparently being used to do away with it: http://www.businessinsider.com/fcc-ajit-pai-debunked-ddos-attack-senate-hearing-net-neutrality-john-oliver-2018-8
Sometimes, the ethics of the tactics used to achieve a thing provide insight into the merits of the thing — if the means are never justified, but are being used for an alleged ‘greater good,’ perhaps the particular end being sought is not really so good after all.
MYSTERY SOURCE SAYS*: “….those companies could disfavor controversial viewpoints or smaller websites and favor the content providers who have the money to pay for better access. The fight isn’t over, though. Read on to learn more about how you can help protect your free and open internet.”
BRIGGS SAYS: “Enough! It’s time for it to end. We can no longer let these reality phobes, bigots, and general all-around humorless sourpusses say what we can see and what we can’t. We must declare all major information-sharing companies public utilities and regulate them accordingly.”
Who would’ve thunk it — Briggs & the ACLU are in total agreement, in general principle — PRINCIPLE! — regarding on-line …dare we use the word…equality of access for ideas!
Politics does make strange bedfellows!
* http://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/internet-speech/what-net-neutrality
Just to make sure that I’m clear – one of your faults is that you’re not a lawyer? “…one of them is not being a lawyer.” Gotta love the English language.
Unsaid and unrecognized is that the (US based) tech giants are kowtowing to the EU’s speech rules, which they agreed to abide to in 2016.
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/31/11817540/facebook-twitter-google-microsoft-hate-speech-europe
I’m not a lawyer, however my understanding is that these entities can either claim to be common carriers and therefore exempt from prosecution due to content, OR they can claim they own it and can censor at will. They cannot do both. So make them pick one – and watch them squirm. They want no responsibility for content AND they want to censor what they don’t like. They won’t “pick” one unless and until they are forced to. Once they have been forced to choose, then you can hit them with the next lawfare case: either “As a common carrier, you cannot censor content as you desire, and yet you have!” or “This comment appeared on your site, and it is obviously and plainly false – pay me for your slander!”
I am a lawyer and was pointing out the insane potential for trouble with what would become the internet back in law school in the mid nineties. I am not trying to sound preciant. If you canfind it track down an old tv series “The Day The Universe Changed” a post-modern plea for relative thought, and an open electronic platform. It is a popularized version of the sort of thinking that was being increasingly promoted ahead of the electronic revolution. These days I have been trying to limit…just limit…the use and reliance on such a platform in schools, colleges and universities, which is so easy to manipulate by big business, ideologues of the right or left, and idiots. However we are dealing with adicts. They think like adicts, reason like adicts and will even admit to being adicts, but are convinced their drug of choice is helpful and benign.
It is a bit strange to see you complaining about this while you were in favor of ending net neutrality, which would have enabled internet providers to block access to the internet to anyone.
You Tube delete many accounts that do not respect their rule. Infowar is not the first one.