I am politically conservative. I’ve seen the way liberal policies have demoralized nation after nation. I had hoped to keep my political views close to my vest, but something happened this morning that makes me very angry!
Some time back I joined a site call Gab. That stands for Go And Build. It was founded by a Christian who saw where things are headed and decided conservatives needed a voice too. His site was banned by big tech. The site was taken down from the app stores, so he built his own infrastructure. He was banned by financial institutions so he started a parallel economy.
People, conservative and liberal, can freely speak their minds. Constitutional free speech is never banned there. Liberals, though, generally feel uncomfortable and aren’t a very big presence there. If one is afraid to hear the truth, then one should probably not go there.
Anyway, this morning I attempted to log into Gab and my Internet browser froze. Thinking it was a one-off, I restarted my computer and tried again. After about the third attempt I realized that Gab has been blocked. I don’t know if this is a countrywide policy or if it’s just our Internet provider. This is ominous! People need a voice, a way to reach out. Speech can’t be just suppressed and suppressed like this!
Censorship is the norm on sites such as Facebook, where child pornography reigns supreme, Twitter, where pedophilia rules the day, and many other liberal-based sites.
I never thought that crackdowns on conservatives would come to this, for governments to start blocking Internet sites, especially democratic-type governments which profess to encourage free speech in some form or other.
I really do fear the world as a whole is sliding deeper into communism, fascism, or whatever label one cares to put upon this. Whatever it is, it’s terrifying!
Not my battle. I just have to deal with suppression in all forms.
All right. Then, you will have to grapple with 2 conflicting ideals. Either, companies that own their private platforms completely, should be able to do anything they want with said platforms (just to be clear this includes censoring conservatives). Or there should be legal exceptions where government can regulate or prohibit censorship, which means bigger government and companies can do less of wat they want, including as you say, censoring conservatives. Have funn with that resolution.
Being taken off the app stores is suppression and censorship. Especially when you also notice what doesn’t get censored and suppressed. There’s a famous lady on Twitter who held an effigy of Donald Trump’s head, saying she wanted him assassinated. The secret service didn’t knock her door down and she wasn’t notified of any violation of Twitter’s policy, that they enforce only against conservatives. If this censorship or whatever was done even-handedly, I could sort of see it, but it isn’t, not at all.
I mean, Censorship involves active suppression, and there’s a difference between that and being proverbially fired by the business community at large because you are no longer Monetizable.
It is still censorship.
It’s not censorship, it’s everybody not wanting to do business with them because lack of moderation is basically PR death. That means apple doesn’t want to host their app, and the hosting provider doesn’t want to host the site. It also means the advertizers runn to relatively far away lands so there goes Monetization, and ISP’s can do what ever they want including bann websites.
The argument that private companies can do what ever they want with their platforms because they are private companies is a conservative one but this is the kind of stuff it brings you.