Censorship on social media is not new, but let’s take a quick look at what has happened over the last four days and see if this is the same, or something much worse.
A total FUBAR event at the US Capital building on January 6th, where members of groups from Antifa on the far left to Qanon on the far right, and everything in between, stormed the building, caused a crap ton of damage, stole stuff, took photos of documents and computers that were in Senator’s offices. Both both a cop and a protester were killed (we discussed the shooting here, both in writing and on our podcast), and in general, all hell broke loose for a couple hours. It was a total disaster.
While that was all happening, Facebook and Twitter shut down, eventually permanently disabling, the private accounts of the freaking President of the United States. Granted, some of the stuff he was saying was not exactly appropriate, but other things were absolutely timely and responsible.
Can you imagine in any time in the past, private companies having the power to silence the POTUS during a critical incident? Can you imagine, even if they had that power, any of them having the balls to do it?
The following day, more social media companies permanently disabled Trumps accounts. Reddit, Twitch and Shopify all removed his accounts or accounts directly linked to him.
They Are Trying To Stop The Signal, Mal
The day after that, Apple and Google both removed Parler from their app stores. For those under a rock, Parler is an alternative social media platform that is known for the fact that it does not censor users. If you already had the app, you still do, but you cannot update the app and no new users can download it. The reason both tech giants gave for removing Parler is that they refuse to censor users.
Shortly after the news hit about Parler, I began hearing rumors that MeWe has also been receiving similar threats, although I have not seen anything verifying that.
After all that crap came out, Amazon jumped into the censorship game and told Parler that unless they start censoring users, Amazon is going to remove parler. This is different though, because Amazon owns the actual servers on which Parler is hosted, so this is not like just not being able to download the app, this is completely removing the entire social media platform from existence.
Not to be left in the cold, Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox internet browser (the software people access the internet with, not a search engine) announced on their very own blog that they too are going to jump into the censorship game because users are too stupid to figure out what is factual and what is not. Those are my words, but here are theirs about what they plan to do: “ Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.”
Not New, But Others Finally See Censorship
Facebook and Twitter censoring people is not remotely new. I have complained about their censorship very loudly for many years.
However, what we have seen in the last couple days is entirely different, and should scare the crap out of you.
It is bad enough that former coworkers of mine, in fact people who used to be my supervisors, who routinely told me to take it easy with remarks I made on social media, are now themselves posting comments about how scary this is.
Leftists Approve
What should scare you even more is the large numbers of leftists who are cheering these Orwellian strides in mass censorship. Folks, we are in a serious culture war. One side controls the mainstream media, social media, and apparently even much of the hardware on which the internet runs.
When I look around, what I see right now resembles a lot of places, but it sure as hell does not look like America. Batten down the hatches, boys and girls. Shit is about to get real froggy.
