What to do about hateful corporate censorship? Where is free speech now that we need it?
A lot has been said about mainstream media (MSM) bias and and corporate censorship. Indeed, CAIRCO has compiled hundreds of instances of mainstream media (MSM) bias and and corporate censorship. It's getting worse. Corporate censorship is escalating exponentially.
In August, 2017, Refugee Resettlement Watch was shadow banned by twitter. Paypal dropped VDare abd American Renaissance. Facebook blocked them, and threatened to drop then entirely. MailChimp cut off their emails (MailChimp is a major bulk email service, similar to Constant Contact). Paypal banned Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative and then reinstated the account after public outrage. PayPal Banned Jihad Watch then reinstated the account after public outrage. (Donate to Jihad Watch here). Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer stated:
Here's a current list to skim. Neither I nor CAIRCO are familiar with the vast majority of these organizations and websites, but it's clear that censorship is at play. In an August 17, 2017 article Building the Electronic Ethnostate, the blog Counter-Currents reported that:
Spotify has removed 27 "hate" bands as defined by the SPLC.
VDare, AltRight.com, and American Renaissance bounced from PayPal.
VDare's conference next April has been shut down by the venue.
Identity Europ's PayPal has been shut down.
Counter-Currents has been booted by PayPal and their Facebook page has been deleted.
Both Red Ice servers were hacked, as were the site owners' Twitter accounts, and still have not recovered.
TRS was taken down by their hosting company, but got a new host and were back online in 3 hours.
Mike Enoch was banned for the fourth time from Twitter.
KickStarter, GoFundMe, and IndieGoGo have all vowed to shut down campaigns related to White Nationalist concerns.
Pax Dickinson's Twitter has been shut down.
Hatreon is offline.
PolNewsForever's Twitter has been shut down.
The Daily Stormer has been targeted with massive DDOS attacks.
The Daily Stormer domain registration was dropped by GoDaddy, transferred to Google, and then seized by Google.
The Daily Stormer discord server has been shut down.
Two upcoming speeches by Richard Spencer have been canceled.
The Altright.com discord server has been shut down.
Vanguard America's WordPress and Facebook accounts have been shut down.
GoFundMe has taken down campaigns to help James Fields.
RootBocks has been taken down by its hosting company, but is back online.
Xurious has been removed from Bandcamp and Soundcloud.
Daniel Friberg and Christopher Dulny, both Swedes, have been barred from entering the United States because of their presence at Unite the Right.
Lauren Southern's Patreon account has been taken down. Lauren Southern's Instagram has been taken down, but is now back up.
NPI's Paypal account has been shut down.
Christopher Cantwell's Facebook, PayPal, and website are gone.
Weev's LinkedIn account has been shut down.
The Paranormies and other podcasts have been kicked off of Soundcloud.
YouTube had demonitized controversial videos, making it impossible for dissident video bloggers to make a living from their work.
Airbnb combed through the social media of people with Charlottesville-area registrations on Unite the Right weekend, and canceled the reservations and accounts of Unite the Right attendees.
Uber has cancelled Baked Alaska's and James Allsup's accounts.
Squarespace is dropping multiple Right-wing sites.
A Toronto free speech event with Faith Goldy, Jordan Peterson, and Gad Saad has been cancelled.
It's blatantly evident that corporate interests are censoring what they arbitrarily define as being politically incorrect - in particular white interest sites, but not leftist fascist, black or islamic hate sites.
This is just the beginning.
Mark Steyn comments on the free speech crackdown in this 5 minute Fox News video: Steyn -Tech giants imposing idealogical straightjackets. It is worth watching:
Tucker Carlson said that the greatest threat to free speech in America today is not from the government but from big tech companies using their monopolies to silence speech.
Who defines what is to be censored? The laughable SPLC - Southern Poverty Law Center hate group? The corporate giant Google, with its intolerant politically correct leftist culture?
Google and ProPublica are teaming up to build a national hate crime database. This does not bode well. Google is making itself the arbiter of hate crime, yet it is conflating hate news with hate crime - which requires a legal process to ascertain. Will the database include crimes of illegal aliens against Americans? Black on White crime? Since the biased mainstream media obfuscates information about the perpetrators in the vast number of these stories, data not present in news articles can not be mined for inclusion.
Also see these articles:
Victims of YouTube's new censorship, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, August 28, 2017.
The Truth Will Not Be Googled, by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, August 19, 2017
Is Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative Websites?, by Paula Bolyard, PJ Media, August 19, 2017.
... The ProPublica-led coalition includes The Google News Lab, Univision News, the New York Times, WNYC, BuzzFeed News, First Draft, Meedan, New America Media, The Root, Latino USA, The Advocate, 100 Days in Appalachia and Ushahidi. The coalition is also working with civil-rights groups [sic] such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and schools such as the University of Miami School of Communications.
ProPublica poses as a middle-of-the-road non-profit journalistic operation, but in reality, it's funded by a stable of uber-liberal donors, including George Soros's Open Society Foundations...
The Slippery Slope of Internet Blacklisting, by Paula Bolyard, PJ Media, August 15, 2017.
Did Google, GoDaddy, and CloudFlare Violate Net Neutrality?, Breitbart, August 21, 2017.
Protecting American Sovereignty Against Big Tech’s Globalist Corporate Power, Breitbart, August 26, 2017.
Leftists and Media Cheer as Mega-Corporations Strip Away Free Speech Rights, by John Nolte, Breitbart, August 29, 2017:
... there is the issue of how those who call themselves progressive and liberals cheer on corporations that have seized control of how Americans communicate and how those corporations have used that control to censor us...
Moreover, there actually is a conspiracy afoot…
The Silicon Valley robber barons and the media are scheming to continue to expand the definitions of hate speech and the alt-right to include opinions and people they do not like. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is the tip of this spear, an organization the establishment media takes seriously for only one cynical reason — because it gives them the cover they so desire to label those of us who do not hold the “correct” views on immigration, gay marriage, affirmative action and the welfare state, as part of the neo-Nazi brotherhood. And by extension, this makes the traditional conservatives and Christians part of the neo-Nazi brotherhood...
You think I have any love for white supremacists like the KKK? Or Marxist supremacists like Antifa? Or the black supremacists in Black Lives Matter? Or the Hispanic supremacists in La Raza [THE RACE]? Or the Islamic supremacists in CAIR? Or the cultural supremacists at CNN? They are all sides of a single coin. But they all should enjoy the right to spew their toxic beliefs.
The left used to understand that the only way to secure all of our speech was to defend the vilest of speech...
What is to be done?
In the August 17, 2017 World Net Daily article The case for regulating tech giants, Sean Harshey makes a number of salient points:
Imagine this scenario: You get a notice from the phone company that your service is being terminated or suspended. They explain they do not approve of the topics you have discussed with your friends and family on the telephone..
Before analyzing the latest efforts of Marxist-fascist activists to silence anyone resisting them, it is important to set the table as to who holds all the real power in the U.S. Liberals have been wildly successful in imposing political correctness into every nook and cranny of American life. The foundations of our nation have been corrupted and are firmly in the control of leftists. Academia at every level, business, entertainment and news media, government bureaucracies, sports, civil service – all are infested with a politically correct dogma that largely or entirely excludes any viewpoint other than what is deemed acceptable to leftist political ideologues.
Far from being a bug in the system, a feature of this cultural Marxist arrangement is the twisted use of language to vilify dissenters and control the narrative... James Damore learned the lesson of liberal-speak... Diversity at Google means “liberal.”...
Google’s firing of Damore reverberated so profoundly with Americans for two reasons. First, it confirmed the experience felt by so many at companies across the country that political correctness has run amok and crossed the line from enforcing civil discourse in the workplace to an offensive weapon to be used by leftists against political opponents. Second, it verified the internal culture of the company that many suspected had lent itself as a surreptitious tool to liberal Democrats to help win elections...
Bloomberg Technology reports this week that the large tech companies are working hard to deny access to their services to people and organizations they deem offensive. Facebook, Google, AirBnB, Uber, PayPal, Apple and others, including traditional financial services, are shutting down accounts and refusing service based purely on political opinion... Conservative users and organizations and those supporting President Trump have had their Facebook and Twitter accounts shut down. YouTube has demonetized conservative videos...
As Google, Facebook and others have no real competitors, and considering their sheer size and domination of the service they provide, it may be time to begin the discussion of public regulation of certain mega-businesses in the tech industry...
As the article mentions, perhaps a Supreme Court case will result in a ruling that political speech and political affiliation engender a protected class which can not be impinged upon.
More immediate action can be taken by state or federal regulators to step in to ensure that monopolistic corporations do not censor free expression of political opinion. More federal regulation in this particular case may be precisely what is needed. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. Remember the breakup of the Bell System AT&T monopoly in 1982? United States antitrust law likely can - and should - be used in today's high tech monopolistic environment.