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YouTube will be banning extremist videos — 42 Comments

1. There is an old saying about how those who get in between two kicking mules will get kicked from both sides.

   I predict that they will soon wish that they had stuck to their previous policy of just providing the public forum and not being responsible for the content.

2. Facebook, Google and their fellow travelers need to be careful right now with the Feds sniffing around. And it’s bi partisan also.

3. Fallout from the Crowder/Maza feud. here’s more:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SATOtyNLYA

4. Our social media overlords intend to be the sole arbitrators of what is allowed on their platforms based on their far left/fascist agenda. All those in opposition must be silenced. The only thing to do at this point is to shun them. Their revenue source is selling your personal information, don’t provide it.

5. Neo-national and international socialism, diversity, progressive liberalism, social justice, feminism, Pro-Choice, political congruence, anti-nativism, and other bigoted ideologies.

6. Redistributive change, color judgments, monotonic divergence, injustice, sex chauvinism, relative and opportunistic quasi-religion, selective exclusion, immigration reform, and other sanctimonious hypocrisies.

7. I’m a subscriber to several youtube channels. They are all aviation videos (I’m an ex PPL), Corporatepilotlife, Premier1driver, 310pilot, Baronpilot, Nikoswings. Of course, since they own their own planes they are obviously well off financially, and they are all white males. Sounds like an over abundance of white privilege to me. How long before youtube bans them???

8. Ive been following P1D as well. He’s a little late on putting out a new vid.

9. Neo refers to the algorithm that YouTube might use to provide the “desired” censorship. I suspect that she and certainly others use the term “algorithm” with tongue in cheek. The word implies passive and unbiased action, though there is no real reason to believe that, even if all actions were algorithm based.

   I don’t know any more about the inner workings of YouTube than others, but I think it highly likely that algorithms merely provide the initial filter, and humans filter in a second step.

   I also suspect that human complaints about content are also the starting point in many cases. There is probably an army of lefties out there carping about being triggered. We see this repeatedly in Congress. There are many times more Dems writing formal complaints to the IRS or DOJ etc. about abuses than Republicans.
   ______

   About 5 days ago Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, had been guesstimating that Trump was nearly certain to win the 2020 election because of the paucity of intelligent leadership among the Dem candidates, but switched to Trump having no chance of winning. Why? Because of social media censorship.
   _____

   Griffin suggests that anti-trust fervor against tech companies is now bipartisan. That certainly is the Kabuki Theater of the day. But Scott McNealy, former long-time CEO of Sun Microsystems gave an interview yesterday in which he stated that this is simply a protection racket, contribution shakedown on the part of the Dems. He said that they can probably stretch out the anti-trust investigations for about 10 years and collect many tens of millions during each of those years.

10. I assume this does not include Muslim jihadist videos. Personally I consider Islam a supremacist ideology worse than White Supremacy and far larger.

    When it comes to “bigoted ideologies” it’s hard to beat Islam.

11. P1D here also.

12. Favorite gun channels: Hickock45, Paul Harrell, Colin Noir…(GASP, He’s black!)

13. Mr. Allsop History: https://mobile.twitter.com/MrAllsopHistory/status/1136326031290376193

    “YouTube have banned me for ‘hate speech’, I think due to clips on Nazi policy featuring propaganda speeches by Nazi leaders. I’m devastated to have this claim levelled against me, and frustrated 15yrs of materials for #HistoryTeacher community have ended so abruptly.”

    Thread, so click over to read the rest.

14. As long as they don’t mess with my gun stripping videos.

15. #VoxAdpocalypse seems to be the go to aggregator address on this story. Link: https://mobile.twitter.com/hashtag/VoxAdpocalypse?src=hashtag_click

16. What are the definitions of “white privilege” and “white supremacy”? It is clear that in common usage it simply means existence as a white person. Every time I see those phrases used in their pejorative sense, it brings to mind organizations such as; Black Congressional Caucus, Black Student Union, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, etc.

    Organizing along racial and ethnic lines to establish leverage is much the norm; and conflict is often the tactic of choice. Sustaining such organizations requires a demon, and white persons are the demons of choice.

    Thanks to the Governmnet’s clumsy attempts to balance society’s playing fields (to achieve equality of outcomes?), we have a climate in which group identity and organization is encouraged, with one notable exception. In the exceptional case it is castigated, and even punished. Now, the “Titans” of social media, and others, most notably the higher education industry, have joined the fray for their own obscure reasons.

    One wonders where it leads, and how will it end?

17. The new policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,”

    Like progressives are superior to the deplorables? 🙂

18. Oldflyer, check out the language research this fellow Zach Goldberg has been doing. Just scroll down a ways: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZachG932

    There’s a constellation of his graphs in a photo page here: https://mobile.twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1135502651704168448

    Just click that photo to enlarge it.

19. Gleichschaltung or in English co-ordination, was in Nazi terminology the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society, “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

    Hey… they also erased books, culture, removed statues, argued the removal of symbols, social moors, changed the language, were socialists, working hard to build a world they thought would be better… and they took over academia… i> not talking Nazis, i am talking feminist/race/gender warriors…

    Well, doesn’t the lefts feminism/race/gender act like a “Ministry of Public Enlightenment” telling us all what is or not acceptable to think, do, believe, and want?

    Using soviet style consciousness raising, public confessions, and targeting the enemy with little repercussion. Who else do we get our marching orders in from? in our homes, press, bedrooms, schools, clubs, boardrooms, stockrooms. lockers, state halls, legal warrens. Even ignoring them is bad (see MGTOW).

    Can you question any of their tenets or points, without potential repercussion?
    [ask Watson the geneticist, ask Summers who used to run Harvard, etc]

    Every revolution needs an army of internal people.

    not only have we proceeded to the level where there is no brake, the wheel wont turn back, and its more dangerous to comment than not… And records of our natures prior to our thinking to shut up have been made for years [and if not, people like Davis-Marks will take care of that!!!]

    But the most interesting part is that we have crossed the line where people can say extermination outright, not imply, and the blow back just isn’t much most of the time.

    It’s open season on white males at Yale University. The student newspaper recently published a disturbing column that called for the targeting of white students – and specifically white male students. “I’m watching you, white boy,” Isis Davis-Marks wrote in an op-ed published in the Yale Daily News. She called for her fellow students to keep copious notes about the behavior of campus white guys so that the evidence might be used against them in future government confirmation hearings.

    Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, students are debating whether or not white male students should even be allowed to talk. That was the focus of an op-ed titled, “Should White Boys Still Be Allowed to Talk?”

    In 2016 Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher advocated on social media for the mass extermination of white people. “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” the white professor wrote on Twitter. Drexel condemned the tweet but took no further action. The university called him an outstanding classroom teacher.

    Georgetown Professor Christine Fair called for the castration and execution of white men. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” she wrote on Twitter. “BONUS: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

    – A teaching assistant at the University of Georgia declared that “some white people may have to die” for black people to advance.

    — in 2017 in Medium, “We had to kill some white people to get out of slavery. Maybe if we’d killed more during the 20th century we still wouldn’t talk about racialized voter disenfranchisement and housing, education, and employment discrimination.”

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    Going to get real interesting… if this is what they say now, what or how many will agree to it as policy who graduate from their classes, and move on to higher places… especially when the demographics changes kick in.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    so what algorithm will You Tube use? the one that handles what Don Lemon said was the most dangerous people in America.. the unprotected class…

20. “The new policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,”

    As these leftist social media companies are manifestly guilty of the very things they claim to be against, they’re setting themselves up for RICO charges.

    “Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.” Napoleon Bonaparte

21. “Videos that are against the law, such as child pornography, are of course different.” — Neo

    So, that is why the Left keeps trying to enact laws against hate speech and wrongthink. And the government arrests guys who make movies about Mohammed.

    This comment does not in anyway condone or excuse child pornography, which is totally inexcusable; however, I remember far too many cases where people have been accused of said offense for something that no sane person would consider pornographic (most memorable one being a dad who took cute pictures of his daughters in the tub covered with bubbles, and was turned in by the photo clerk who made his prints). HINT: pornographers don’t take their film to WalMart for developing. (Well, it’s been awhile since I saw the story.)

22. Relevant to the current discussion is the excuse that the Big Tech companies say they are independent businesses. But these articles shows they are not independent businesses.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shareholders-proposals-climate-facial-recognition-won-30-percent-vote/

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/07/frustrated-with-facebook-google-tesla-so-are-their-shareholders/

    https://www.businessinsider.my/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6/?r=US&IR=T

    These companies are not listening to their shareholders when they do what Youtube just did. Shareholders accountability is the last measure of a true business in my eyes.

    Too bad, cause if they don’t listen to their shareholders and virtue signal then they stop being a true business in the capitalist market economy of the modern world. Once that happens then they will lose their defense against governments and regulators. Nobody will cry crocodile tears when that happens.

23. NYT excerpts for pondering:

    The prohibition will also cover videos denying that violent events, like the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, took place.

    The prohibition will then be extended to videos denying that alleged violent events took place, when, in fact, they did not, but the allegations are being used to support Leftist agendas.
    (e.g., Governor Palin and the “crosshairs incitement” slander)

    YouTube did not name any specific channels or videos that would be banned. But on Wednesday, numerous far-right creators began complaining that their videos had been deleted, or had been stripped of ads, presumably a result of the new policy.

    “It’s our responsibility to protect that, and prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence,” the blog post said.

    Poor editing, or gaffe?

    The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said a prominent right-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.

    In the videos, that creator, Steven Crowder, a conservative commentator with nearly four million YouTube subscribers, repeatedly insulted Carlos Maza, a journalist from Vox. Mr. Crowder used slurs about Mr. Maza’s Cuban-American ethnicity and sexual orientation. Mr. Crowder said his comments were harmless, and YouTube determined that they did not break its rules.
    “Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site,” YouTube said in a statement about its decision on Mr. Crowder.

    On Wednesday, YouTube appeared to backtrack, saying that Mr. Crowder had, in fact, violated its rules, and that his ability to earn money from ads on his channel would be suspended as a result.

    “We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community,” the company wrote on Twitter.

    Translated: we really don’t want to impede all the clicks Crowder gets, but since we don’t reveal what our rules really cover, we can suddenly discover that we found some missing ballots in a car trunk if the harassment harms our community of favored whiners; however, by demonitizing Crowder instead of banning him, we can still get our cut from his blog even if he doesn’t.
    PS: any video posting slurs insulting Crowder don’t count.

    The whiplash-inducing deliberations illustrated a central theme that has defined the moderation struggles of social media companies: Making rules is often easier than enforcing them.

    It’s not that hard to enforce them if you make them up as you go, depending on how much backlash you get.

    The kind of content that will be prohibited under YouTube’s new hate speech policies includes videos that claim Jews secretly control the world, that say women are intellectually inferior to men and therefore should be denied certain rights, or that suggest that the white race is superior to another race, a YouTube spokesman said.

    Not included: videos that claim white people secretly control the world, that say men are inferior to women and should be considered guilty in all he-said, she-said disputes (especially if sex is involved), or that suggest that a wise Latina has judicial insights that other SCOTUS justices lack.
    It really is easier to make up rules than to enforce them, when neutral enforcement cuts against your agenda.

    The company also said channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies” but don’t violate them outright would be removed from YouTube’s advertising program, which allows channel owners to share in the advertising revenue their videos generate.

    And, of course, they get to decide how close is too close, and how often is repeatedly. On sharing: see Crowder demonitization above.
    Or to rephrase, “which allows YouTube to siphon off all the advertising revenue THEIR POSTERS’ VIDEOS CREATE, instead of just part of it.”

    In response to the criticism, YouTube announced in January that it would recommend fewer objectionable videos, such as those with conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and vaccine misinformation, a category it called “borderline content.” The YouTube spokesman said on Tuesday that the algorithm changes had resulted in a 50 percent drop in recommendations to such videos in the United States. He declined to share specific data about which videos YouTube considered “borderline.”

    It is very common to cite the obvious stories that kind of meet a consensus of objectionability from both sides (which is done above in every list of “things we plan to ban”), then move on to those videos that only one side objects to, without ever specifying that’s been done.

24. Here’s another problem that isn’t new: people who are arguing AGAINST some of those things YouTube claims it wants to ban, but get caught in the algorithm because they have to talk about the objectionable material in order to refute it.
    Sometimes that is accidental, but sometimes it is very deliberate.

    Apparently @YouTube removed a video by @skeptoid that debunks holocaust denial. https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10156478534366947&id=6750726946 …

    https://hillreporter.com/candace-owens-is-suspended-from-facebook-36133

    The latest conservative pundit to receive a ban is Candace Owens. The right wing provocateur took to Twitter to complain about her recent Facebook suspension.

    Owens directed her complaint directly to the President. She wrote, “Dear Donald Trump, My Facebook page has been suspended for 7 days for posting that white supremacy is not a threat to black America, as much as father absence and & liberal policies that incentivize it, are. I am censored for posting the poverty rates in fatherless homes.”

    I think there have been earlier examples, but I don’t remember them exactly right now.

25. From the link Neo cited above – it was very prescient:
    https://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech
    The Remedy is More Speech
    FRANKLYN HAIMAN SUMMER 1991
    Slurs against groups may be painful, but suppressing speech is not the answer.

    We must also be wary of restrictions, such as those being adopted by some universities, that punish racist or sexist speech on the basis of vague criteria such as the creation of an “unpleasant” or “hostile” environment, rather than specific and demonstrable interference with a targeted individual’s ability to function. Not that unpleasantness or discomfort resulting from the speech of others is benign. It is not a harm, however, from which people in a free, and often disputatious, society can be immunized. … Absent a clear and present danger of material consequences, the court believed that such verbal abuse must be tolerated. That is a standard which universities, supposedly bastions of free inquiry, would do well to embrace.

    To do otherwise would be to accept the proposition, offered as perhaps their most forceful argument by the advocates of restricting racist speech, that the emotional distress suffered by the victims of such communication is, in and of itself, a sufficient harm to justify an exception to First Amendment protections. That real emotional pain may be experienced by the targets of racially, religiously, or sexually abusive speech is undeniable, particularly when they feel their group to be vulnerable to oppression by those actually or potentially in power. But emotional pain is a highly subjective, individualized experience that can result from a wide range of stimuli, including not only explicit and deliberate verbal attacks but unintended slights and even vivid historical or fictional accounts of traumatic events.

26. They’ve been working on this banning thing for a long time, but the big problem has been figuring out how to do it and claim they aren’t targeting conservatives.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/12/social-media-facebook-twitter-google-youtube-bias-conservatives-republicans-column/1250893002/
    Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives
    Matt Lamb, Opinion contributor Published 5:00 a.m. ET Sept. 12, 2018 | Updated 3:25 p.m. ET Sept. 12, 2018

    Facebook, Twitter and YouTube need to be honest about what they will remove or shadow ban instead of suppressing conservatives and claiming fairness.
    …
    As a small-government conservative, I’m uncomfortable with calls to regulate Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, though. I don’t want the federal government to have control over the social media giants.

    However, I do want the social media giants, whom we at Students for Life spend money to advertise with, to be honest with us and provide accurate estimates on how the money we spend with them will produce results. For example, when we boost a video we produce to reach a specific audience, Facebook estimates how many more views or sign-ups we can expect. But if they are hiding our posts from our audience, they are purposefully misrepresenting their estimates.
    …
    Likewise, there is another issue if Facebook sells us on one result and then changes the game midway through. If we invest thousands of dollars in building up a Facebook audience, then Facebook deliberately suppresses conservative content, they have changed the agreement we made when we started investing money in building an audience under the presumption it would increase our reach. It is like being paid to build a house, and then on the last day ramming a bulldozer into the house. Yes, you would say, you did build the house and follow that contract, but then you changed the game at the last minute and ruined the product we paid you to produce.

    This post gives the other Owens incident I was trying to remember, although it’s a (supposedly) different media platform:

    In 2017, PragerU sued Google for hiding some of its videos and demonetizing them as well on YouTube. Similarly, Twitter recently apologized to conservative commentator Candace Owens for “mistakenly” blocking her tweets after she paraphrased the racist tweets of Sarah Jeong, a new New York Times editorial board member to make a point about double standard.

    Apparently, YouTube is going to stop apologizing for “mistakes” and just take people down, because their algorithm said to, and the computer is never wrong.

27. USA Today post continued:

    If Facebook does not want conservative groups on its platform, it must make that clear and stop claiming it is there to allow people “to share and express what matters to them.”

    The same with Twitter: “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information, instantly, without barriers.” Youtube: “to give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Google: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful … for everyone.”

    Simply make it clear: We believe that supporting the protection of innocent life, supporting Trump, supporting tax cuts, etc. goes against our values and community standards. Therefore, conservative groups will find their material blocked, suppressed, or shadow banned. We do not actually believe in an open marketplace of ideas,</b instead, we support a place where people who are not conservative, who support Hillary Clinton, who want to restrict gun access, and who want legalized abortion on demand are free to share their own ideas alongside videos of cute puppies and cats. Conservatives need not sign up.

    After all, honesty is the best policy.
    

    They can’t do that openly, of course, because then Congress would have to remove them from the list of neutral content providers, thus removing some protections and benefits, and label them as publishers, which is what they really are. This YouTube policy is an attempt to thread the needle described here:

    https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-15888.html
    If Big Tech firms want to retain valuable government protections, then they need to get out of the censorship business.
    Adam Candeub Mark Epstein
    May 7, 2018

    Online platforms should receive immunity only if they maintain viewpoint neutrality, consistent with traditional legal norms for distributors of information. Before the Internet, common law held that newsstands, bookstores, and libraries had no duty to ensure that each book and newspaper they distributed was not defamatory. Courts initially extended this principle to online platforms. Then, in 1995, a federal judge found Prodigy, an early online service, liable for content on its message boards because the company had advertised that it removed obscene posts. The court reasoned that “utilizing technology and the manpower to delete” objectionable content made Prodigy more like a publisher than a library.

    Congress responded by enacting Section 230, establishing that platforms could not be held liable as publishers of user-generated content and clarifying that they could not be held liable for removing any content that they believed in good faith to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” This provision does not allow platforms to remove whatever they wish, however. Courts have held that “otherwise objectionable” does not mean whatever a social media company objects to, but “must, at a minimum, involve or be similar” to obscenity, violence, or harassment. Political viewpoints, no matter how extreme or unpopular, do not fall under this category.
    …
    The dominant social media companies must choose: if they are neutral platforms, they should have immunity from litigation. If they are publishers making editorial choices, then they should relinquish this valuable exemption. They can’t claim that Section 230 immunity is necessary to protect free speech, while they shape, control, and censor the speech on their platforms. Either the courts or Congress should clarify the matter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-platform-publisher-lawsuit
    Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes
    In its defense against a former app startup, Facebook is contradicting its long-held claim to be simply a neutral platform

    Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company.

    But in a small courtroom in California’s Redwood City on Monday, attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in speeches: Facebook, they repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.

    The contradictory claim is Facebook’s latest tactic against a high-profile lawsuit, exposing a growing tension for the Silicon Valley corporation, which has long presented itself as neutral platform that does not have traditional journalistic responsibilities.
    …
    Questions about Facebook’s moral and legal responsibilities as a publisher have escalated surrounding its role in spreading false news and propaganda, along with questionable censorship decisions.

    Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University law professor, said it was frustrating to see Facebook publicly deny that it was a publisher in some contexts but then claim it as a defense in court.

    “It’s politically expedient to deflect responsibility for making editorial judgements by claiming to be a platform,” he said, adding, “But it makes editorial decisions all the time, and it’s making them more frequently.”

    Just following Supreme Court precedent, which says that a fine is not a tax, unless it is.

28. I wonder how today’s Supreme Court would handle a certain 1977 case from Skokie, Illinois?

    I am definitely both a free speech absolutist and someone who is inclined to let the internet companies establish their own policies and not regard it as censorship because they do not have the power of the state. Also, I worry about the tech giants ability to subtly (and not so subtly) manipulate people with the aim of influencing elections and public policy in a way that renders moot anything like a level playing field for various legitimate points of view.

    Of crucial importance is how YouTube defines extremism. The penalizing of commentary and humor YouTube channels is not encouraging.

    If the social media companies are acting like editors, then should they be subject to the same liabilities as established media for all the content on their platforms? Would that would just result in the removal of anything more controversial than cat videos?

    The question of whether the social media platforms constitute some form of de facto public square seems to be an open question compared to the literal public squares of previous eras. The laissez-faire in me says no, but I worry about the lack of viable alternatives. Steven Crowder, for example, has been completely demonitized and worries about being banned outright. Sure, he could move to Bitchute but how many of his millions of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views for each video would follow? Could alternatives to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube really be considered alternatives if they are intellectual ghettos for the non-politically correct?

    The test of one’s commitment to free speech really does get back to how you treat speech you do not like.

29. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/the-guardians-view-on-free-speech-online-a-messy-compromise
    “Rightwing extremists are now being deprived of their income stream from YouTube advertisements. Not to do so would be worse”

    Nowhere in the article do you find any commentary about Leftwing extremists; presumably, they do not exist.

30. Perfectly gratuitous. In 1995, you read a publication like Wired and you got the impression that people employed in tech were not intensely invested in political controversies and had a libertarian bias. There’s been considerable industrial consolidation and the industry is now under the sway of people whose disposition toward public life is notably different than was the case a quarter century ago. By all appearances, they’re enraged that the political opposition could use digital tools to mobilize people toward ends like the Trump campaign. Also, the most recent Democratic administration was the most unscrupulous yet, making use of the IRS, financial regulators, and the Department of Justice to harass the political opposition in various ways.

    The best solution to this morass is the restoration of the rule book. The left fancies they won’t be injured, so is uninterested in such a project. We have to make them regret that. This will be ugly.

31. Look for Lee Smith to be banned if he ever publishes on YouTube.
    (gotta get some kind of hook for a tangential but important post)

    https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/285830/spies-are-the-new-journalists
    SPIES ARE THE NEW JOURNALISTS
    And with the help of big names in media they’re turning journalism into an intelligence operation

    By Lee Smith
    June 4, 2019 • 9:30 PM

    There are two sets of laws in the United States today. One is inscribed in law books and applies to the majority of Americans. The other is a canon of privileges enjoyed by an establishment under the umbrella of an intelligence bureaucracy that has arrogated to itself the rights and protections of what was once a free press.

    The media is now openly entwined with the national security establishment in a manner that would have been unimaginable before the advent of the age of the dossier—the literary forgery the FBI used as evidence to spy on the Trump team. In coordinating to perpetrate the Russiagate hoax on the American public, the media and intelligence officials have forged a relationship in which the two partners look out for the other’s professional and political interests. Not least of all, they target shared adversaries and protect mutual friends.

    Too much good stuff to excerpt.

32. Artfldgr: when enough white men get upset enough to stop going to the colleges that hate them, it will be interesting to see how well the schools do without them.

    I’ve always thought Bret Weinstein should have amplified the “day without white people on campus” instead of objecting to it.
    Take a whole week off, instead of just one day.
    Wikipedia:

    Weinstein again experienced controversy when he became the focus of a campus protest at Evergreen State College, where he was teaching biology. His involvement began when he wrote a letter to Evergreen faculty in March of 2017. His letter objected to a change in the College’s decades-old tradition of observing a “Day of Absence” during which students and faculty of a minority race would stay home from campus to highlight their contributions to the College.

    Say, didn’t that tradition, and its reverse, implicitly allege ‘that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion”?

33. Of course, the point that gets missed is that deplatforming people doesn’t actually get rid of them or prevent them from spreading their arguments. Folks did communicate before social media and if enough of them get kicked off YouTube and friends, they and their fans become a great prize for other social media companies.

    What it will do is further embitter conservatives and, by ghettoizing their content, create an environment where it’s likely to become more strident and more extreme. It also infantilizes liberals and the general public, leaving them ignorant and unprepared to handle right wing arguments and political activism.

    Mike

34. A thread by yikes_run (@wokoharambae) on the system and tactics used by Carlos Maza and co.: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1136374818150977537.html

    Many may have seen this laid out before, though some may not have. Still, it is an apt description of what’s going on, both “against” YouTube and with the “co-operation” of sympathetic agents inside YouTube, aimed, of course, at the Marxist’s and “woke’s” chosen political opposition — nominally Crowder, in this instance, along with everyone like him or even merely liking him. If innocent bystanders are felled along the way . . . ? The woke will put that blame on YouTube, shrug, and move on to their next targets.

35. MBunge on June 6, 2019 at 2:02 am gave a well-written & succinct explanation of the likely consequences of subverting the “answer to bad speech is more speech” argument. The second paragraph is already in operation.

    ‘What it will do is further embitter conservatives and, by ghettoizing their content, create an environment where it’s likely to become more strident and more extreme. It also infantilizes liberals and the general public, leaving them ignorant and unprepared to handle right wing arguments and political activism.”

    Of course, they already don’t try to “handle” right wing arguments at all, and are dismissive of any right wing political activism, because there really hasn’t been any yet.
    So far, the David French model of comity has prevailed (cf. McCarthy and Barr lauding Mueller back before his true colors were revealed).
    The Ahmari model is gearing up now.

36. sdferr on June 6, 2019 at 9:20 am said:
    A thread by yikes_run (@wokoharambae) on the system and tactics used by Carlos Maza and co.: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1136374818150977537.html

    Many may have seen this laid out before, though some may not have. Still, it is an apt description of what’s going on, both “against” YouTube and with the “co-operation” of sympathetic agents inside YouTube,
    * * *
    The description of how power is leveraged and activism organized is very enlightening, and can be discerned in other events.
    The prescription for YouTube to outwait complaints would work very well, if YouTube wasn’t looking for excuses to ban conservatives and working with leftists to uncover them.
    For corporations that aren’t inherently / covertly leftist: they should pay attention more carefully.
    Note that the Left itself knows the value of outwaiting powerless opponents (Northam & Virginia).

37. I predict that they will soon wish that they had stuck to their previous policy of just providing the public forum and not being responsible for the content.

    They’re not doing that because they don’t want to and because they believe they’ll get away with it. Which they probably will. This is all about denying the political opposition the use of what were common tools of communication. It’s as if A T & T had cut off the Reagan’s campaign’s phone service in 1984. Keep in mind, their definition of ‘extremist’ includes Dennis Prager, so it also includes just about any articulate Republican this side of Susan Collins and Geoffrey Kabaservice.

38. Matthew M states in part that he is “someone who is inclined to let the internet companies establish their own policies and not regard it as censorship because they do not have the power of the state.”

    That is flabbergasting foolishness.

    Censorship is censorship, and the social media are in fact much more powerful than the state when freedom of speech is the issue.

39. Mark Steyn will be on their list soon, I’m sure.

    https://gatesofvienna.net/2019/06/mark-steyn-if-the-alternative-is-surrendering-our-liberty-over-death-threats-to-hell-with-that/#more-48404

40. I now favor breaking up Google (esp. separate Search from YouTube), and nationalizing Facebook — as a gov’t operated utility with explicit rules.

    I also think that advertising should be taxed more heavily, but income rates should go down.

    Socialism fails with real goods — not enough to go around. Zero-sum at any given time. Yet copying and “too cheap to monitor” digital content can be spread to all. All digital entertainment can be provided to all with digital connections at very very low cost per user.

    Huge value of FB is that “everyone” is there; value of YouTube is that all videos can be found there. Should be possible to have a “Library of Congress – Video section” to fully duplicate all YouTube videos, and exclude those which violate the law, like child porn.

    A related alternative is a Digital Utility Commission, which fines those media centers guilty of excess censorship. Big fines.

41. ymarsakar on June 6, 2019 at 7:02 am said:
    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    Why is my comment moderated again?

42. Yammer, it’s another conspiracy requiring divine retribution.

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