https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&
My February 22 post noted that the “deplatforming” of seemingly mainstream conservative voices by the Big Tech oligarchs was reaching ever greater levels of audacity. That post covered some truly extreme instances of the phenomenon, including the total blocking by Twitter on January 8 of all accounts associated with then-sitting President Trump, and the removal on January 11 of Twitter’s biggest competitor Parler from its Amazon servers and then from the Google and Apple app stores. Those examples are rather hard to top.
But those apparent successes have only inspired the deplatformers on to new gambits. Clearly, this phenomenon is not going away any time soon. Even since that post less than two weeks ago, there has been a continuing series of strikes by the big tech censors, each time aimed at someone who has transgressed the current boundaries of political correctness.
On the other hand, from observing each new strike of the censors as it occurs, it’s hard to perceive exactly what the grand plan may be. Maybe there isn’t one. This is much more like the Cambodian genocide than its Nazi predecessor: rather than the enemies all getting rounded up and hauled off at once to the extermination camps, we instead have, every few days, another one or a few seemingly randomly-selected enemies suddenly disappearing without explanation, never to be seen again. One imagines at each Big Tech company a group a several twenty-somethings, just out of college, sitting around the conference room filled with open pizza boxes, rubbing their hands together and giggling and saying things like “Let’s see who we can get away with canceling next!” OK, today this is probably happening on Zoom meetings rather than in actual conference rooms, but it’s the same idea.
I have compiled below some of the more recent deplatformings, all of which are certainly well up there on the audacity scale. Here goes: