RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/12/the_great_social_silencing_145014.html

Last week Silicon Valley silenced the president. In unison, the social media giants, with an assist from Amazon and Apple, also eliminated their most popular conservative competitor and announced that their own moderation policies would now extend to other companies. Meanwhile, CNN openly called for Fox News to be banned from cable, while a major talk radio network issued new speech rules to its hosts, extending tech’s moderation policies to the offline world. Beyond all this, Congress and the European Union called for powerful new regulation of online speech.

As a handful of unelected billionaires declare sovereignty over digital speech, where might the coming months take us?

Twitter once touted itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and rebuked Congress’ calls for it to ban terrorists, proclaiming that “the ability of users to share freely their views — including views that many people may disagree with or find abhorrent” — was its mission. Indeed, most of the early social platforms emphasized unfettered speech above all other considerations. Over the years, this utopian dream has given way to an emphasis on “healthy conversation” and ever-changing enforcement.

Yet for most of their existence, social media platforms have largely avoided censoring elected officials in the U.S. even as they have deleted the accounts of foreign leaders. That all changed last year as Silicon Valley for the first time began labeling President Trump’s tweets as “disputed” and “false.” As progressive segments of the public embraced this new censorship, platforms moved from merely fact-checking posts to deleting them entirely and threatening to ban some lawmakers.

The courts have repeatedly ruled that Trump’s Twitter account is an official government outlet and thus he is prohibited from blocking users with whom he disagrees. How then is a private company able to establish “acceptable speech” rules for a government publication or silence it entirely? 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system?token=

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/forbes_boldly_announces_its_intention_to_discriminate_against_staffers_of_president_trump.html

Common decency and morality, not to mention US law, prohibit not hiring an individual on the basis of race, creed, gender, religion, national origin or physical challenge.  Merit should be the basic hiring criterion.  In recent years this lofty ideal, admittedly not always practiced, has been modified with additional criteria of affirmative action and diversity which often clash with and negate the former. 

But now Randall Lane, chief content officer and editor of Forbes Magazine, which specializes in business and technology, publicly announced a “truth reckoning” as he calls it, a new discriminatory  business relationship  and future content policy towards anyone or any business daring to hire prominent staffers who worked in President Donald J. Trump’s (R) administration.

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

Hmmm, so this hollow threat suggests that when Forbes works with, writes about others in the business world who are not tainted with “Trump’s fellow fabulists” they will not “scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet” and will therefore be more likely to accept anything they say; print their public relations puffery verbatim.  Or maybe with slightly altered nuance as he later slightly qualifies, “this standard needs to apply to liars from either party,” thus admitting that up to now Forbes hasn’t done that scrutinize, double-check thing very thoroughly very often; that Forbes itself is “a potential funnel of disinformation.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/twitter-unpersons-trump-matthew-vadum/

Twitter, the popular microblogging website President Donald Trump masterfully exploited to win office in 2016, has permanently banned the president on false charges, expanding Big Tech’s ongoing, unprecedented wave of digital repression against conservatives and Republicans.

Twitter took action January 8, two days after several individuals bearing Trump campaign flags and paraphernalia ran amok in the United States Capitol while lawmakers were attempting to officially certify the results of the hopelessly fraud-ridden, compromised November 6 election that the dementia-suffering leftist Joe Biden and his Chinese Communist Party-influenced corporate allies claim he won. This Big Lie that 81 million Americans voted for a vegetable is so important to the Left that anyone who questions it on social media is swiftly persecuted and marginalized.

Now that the fog of war created by the lying media is dissipating, we have learned that many of the so-called Capitol invaders were not invaders at all. They did not “storm” the complex but were well-behaved and allowed in by Capitol police. It was not much of a coup attempt, which may explain why Capitol police posed for selfies with the Americans who allegedly forced their way in.

One of the more interesting voices on Twitter throughout this crisis has been, interestingly enough, fashion model Emily Ratajkowski who tweeted January 7, asking if anyone else felt that Capitol police “being absent/letting Trump people in/providing insane visuals of MAGA dudes on the floor of the house was wildly convenient to justifying big tech’s rollout of censorship?”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/parler-is-silenced_3651255.html

The social media company Parler—which is a French word meaning “to speak”—was mugged and left for dead by Big Tech last week in what appears to be the start of a cultural offensive aimed at stifling conservative advocacy in our country’s public discourse.

I am shocked but not surprised. In my last column in these pages, I warned of a looming and authoritarian “corporatocracy” that threatened to stifle freedom in a way that our government never could. Little did I know that within a week of writing, behemoth social media companies would prove my words prophetic.

Here’s the story: After the godawful Capitol Hill riot of Jan. 6, Twitter and Facebook launched a cyber jack-booted crackdown on conservative advocacy. Not only did the social media giants cancel President Trump’s accounts, but Twitter appears to have launched a great purge.

Washington Examiner columnist Byron York, actor and conservative icon James Woods, and Fox News pundit Brett Hume, among many others, announced that they had each lost tens of thousands of followers on Twitter in just a few days. Similarly, less famous voices reported the loss of hundreds of followers.

Whatever is going on—Twitter hasn’t said—the company seems hellbent on stifling conservatives’ ability to communicate across the width and breadth of the social media public square.

Attacking a Competitor

The subsequent attack on Parler was even more egregious. Parler is a direct competitor of Twitter and operates in almost the exact manner; members post their thoughts or news articles, with “followers” able to comment and add the original posts to their own timelines.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/09/the-woke-purge/

Cancel culture doesn’t exist, they say. And yet with the flick of a switch, billionaire capitalists voted for by precisely nobody have just silenced a man who is still the democratically elected president of the United States. With the push of a button in their vast temples to technology, the new capitalist oligarchs of Silicon Valley have prevented a man who won the second largest vote in the history of the American republic just two months ago — 74million votes — from engaging with his supporters (and critics) in the new public square of the internet age.

Not only does cancel culture exist — it is the means through which the powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era and their clueless cheerleaders in the liberal elites interfere in the democratic process and purge voices they disapprove of. That’s what Twitter’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump confirms.

The new capitalists’ cancellation of the democratically elected president of the United States is a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world. We underestimate the significance of this act of unilateral purging at our peril. It demonstrates that the greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes not from the oafs and hard-right clowns who stormed the Capitol this week, but from the technocratic elites who spy in the breaching of the Capitol an opportunity to consolidate their cultural power and their political dominance.

Twitter’s ban on Trump is extraordinary for many reasons. First, there’s the arrogance of it. Make no mistake: this is the bosses vs democracy; corporates vs the people; exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion, which is where most political and public debate takes place in the 21st century. Those who cannot see how concerning and sinister it is that a handful of Big Tech companies have secured a virtual monopoly over the social side of the internet, and are now exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express in these forums, urgently needs a wake-up call.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nikki-haley-likens-trump-twitter-ban-to-act-of-chine

Social media companies banning President Donald Trump is something the Chinese Communist Party would do, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said Friday.

“Silencing people, not to mention the President of the U.S., is what happens in China not our country,” Haley wrote in a tweet.

Twitter announced earlier in the day that it was permanently removing Trump’s account, which had been active since before he took office in 2016. The company claimed his recent tweets were inciting violence.

Trump in response accused Twitter of “banning free speech” and coordinating “with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me—and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me.”

Trump said his team has been negotiating with competitors to Twitter and is looking into building their own platform in the near future.

Facebook also banned Trump, at least for the remainder of his term.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/dershowitz-230-trump-facebook/2021/01/09/

Legal expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax TV on Saturday morning that Facebook and Twitter should lose their exemptions under the Communications Decency Act as a result of banning President Donald Trump.

Section 230 of the act protects social media companies from liability for content their users post.

“Two thirty [230] basically exempts Twitter and other social media from being held responsible for their content and the content others put on because they’re supposed to be just a platform where anything goes on,” Dershowitz told host Carl Higbie on “Saturday Report.”

“But once they become a publisher, once they decide, ‘No, we don’t like this president, we like the other president,’ then they lose their exemption under Section 230, and I think there will be Congressional action to limit Section 230 to actual platforms.”

Both Facebook and Twitter have banned President Trump from posting on their platforms. Twitter did so permanently. Facebook said it’s suspension will last until the president’s term is over.

“Anybody who censors selectively should lose their 230 exemption,” Dershowitz said.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/08/media-outrage-over-capitol-riot-isnt-about-defending-democracy-its-about-wielding-power/

For our political and media elites, the capitol riot on Wednesday is the perfect excuse to ‘cleanse’ the country of Trump supporters.

After the pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Twitter blue-checks, politicians, and elite corporate journalists wailed and rent their garments in outrage. But they weren’t really outraged.

Yes, the breach of the capitol was appalling and disturbing. Most people didn’t see it coming and were understandably shocked when images of MAGA bros fighting capitol police began popping up on social media (although the authorities should have been better prepared, most of all D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had earlier rejected offers of additional law enforcement.) There’s no question the protesters who decided to riot should be prosecuted, as all rioters everywhere should be.

But elite outrage is not really about what happened at the capitol—about the “sacred citadel of our democracy being defiled” and so on. The outrage, like almost all expressions of righteous indignation from our elites in the Trump era, is performative. It is in service of a larger purpose that has nothing to do with the peaceful transfer of power and everything to do with the wielding of power.

Specifically, it’s about punishing supporters of President Trump. If the pro-Trump mob can be depicted as “terrorists” and “traitors,” then there’s almost nothing we shouldn’t do to silence them. Right? Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, said the quiet part out loud on Thursday when he mused (in a now-deleted tweet) that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part” and the more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.”

That’s not the kind of language you use when you’re in the business of reporting the news. It’s the kind of language you use when you’re in the business of social control.