By David Codrea
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Many of your favorite YouTubers could be about to disappear,” political and social commentator Paul Joseph Watson warns (note some language is NSFW). He’s referring to how the video-sharing giant is categorizing popular conservative issue proponents as “extremist” and limiting their audiences by placing them in “restricted” mode.
“Why does the media want to silence me? It’s because I’m kicking their @$$ and they can’t win the argument on a level playing field … They’re clearly building the narrative that anyone who even hints at challenging the leftist dogma on anything is an extremist and must be silenced.”
Censorship by the social media giants appears to be a plan to salvage exclusive gatekeeper status for those the “progressives” want us to get our information from, the people I call “Authorized Journalists.” They’ve been desperate to shut down the upstarts ever since they sensed the competition meant they were no longer needed. Back in 2009, one of their mouthpieces was even proposing:
“[P]erhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread … via a progressive energy tax …”
That plan to use coercive and confiscatory government taxes to suppress information appears to have gone nowhere, so now the social media giants are taking the task on themselves.
Twitter is also taking steps to control what it will allow and what it will restrict. Aside from its notorious banning of gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos, per a recent Breitbart report:
“Twitter has confirmed it is experimenting with graying out the profiles of users it deems are posting ‘sensitive content,’ displaying a warning to others before they can read their tweets.”
It’s curious how they missed Marxist parasites flipping off communist genocide victims. I guess that’s not hateful or offensive enough.
So who determines “sensitive content,” and specifically those who should be regarded as “haters”?
Colleague Herschel Smith at “The Captain’s Journal” notes Google’s guidelines for determining “offensive” content defers to some of the usual suspects:
“Reputation research is important for identifying websites which promote hate and violence. The Pew Research Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are some reputable sources that can be used for reputation research.”
And who are the arbiters of news that’s real and news that’s “fake”… ?
How about totally unqualified “leftwing moonbats”?
Readers of my blog, “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance” have seen regular instances of my work, including exclusive AmmoLand Shooting Sports News reports, that have been removed from the Google News feed. What that means is much of the stuff that is not being reported by anyone else is confined to the echo chamber of regular readers, and dependent for further propagation either by readers taking it on themselves to share links or via social media like Facebook or Twitter.
And what that means is … well, here, let me give you an example you can see for and prove to yourself: This link (now limited to the relatively obscure Internet Archive/Wayback Machine because the host site is no more) shows the hundreds of reports my late friend and colleague Mike Vanderboegh and I did exposing Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” before the “mainstream media” even noticed it. Most of it has remained ignored even though our early reports have been vindicated by what has since been uncovered, and there’s no reason to think the unexplored claims wouldn’t bear out if those with the resources to do so investigated them.
It probably will never happen because Mike and I weren’t “real reporters.”
Noting the reason behind letting guns walk to Mexico (it was, as an ATF source noted from the outset, “to pad statistics,” not the “botched gun sting” misdirection that mainstream outlets would have us believe), it’s easy to see how closing off social media venues for sharing such information is a direct threat to gun owners being able to get the information they need to protect their rights.
I realize many gun owners won’t have anything to do with social media, and expect to see comments here to that effect. I would argue that is a squandering of resources, and cedes an ideological battlespace to the enemies of the right to keep and bear arms.
It’s curious that whenever “conservative” messengers start to gain traction in the marketplace, “progressives” try to use government coercion to shut them down and regain an enforced lead. We saw it with the internet tax proposal and we have seen it proposed against “right wing talk radio” with calls for the FCC to reinstitute the Opposite Day “Fairness Doctrine.”
Using the chair they not shy about picking up in this particular bar fight, the case could be made that Facebook, Google, and Twitter respectively hold near-monopolies on the services they provide. Acting in concert and with full knowledge of each others’ policies to reward “right thinking” and punish “wrong thinking” seems effectively an act of collusion.
Also see: Facebook Censorship Closes Off Information Ignored By Gatekeeper Media
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.