Dear andreas,
There is a lot to unpack in the Soviet Union's - excuse me - Big Tech's de-platforming of Alex Jones – and in the horrid censorship, often by covert, algorithmic means towards the Alternative Media in recent years. This stealth shadow censorship kicked into high gear during the early days of the 2016 Presidential Election, which I experienced directly and observed Internet-wide.
According to a Supreme Court ruling, "Hate Speech" is unconstitutional and it is protected in the US under the First Amendment Right to Free Speech. Alex Jones was not in violation of any US laws in his activities with InfoWars and he is now demanding the right to a Congressional Hearing.
Jones did, however run afoul of the whimsy of numerous corporate social media platforms' indistinct Terms of Service (TOS). These corporations all pitilessly "un-personed" Jones in one fell swoop, like ninja synchronized underwater assassin ballerinas.
This is Fascism. For everyone who hates Alex Jones and is glad that he was de-platformed: You have ceased to be an American. My advice to you is to go to the EU, where the censorship and libel laws are really strong, that is, if you don't prefer China. Go live the Globalist Dream.
The major social media platforms are all monopolies. These monopolies have been enabled by US lobbyists who claim and lawmakers who agree that they need to remain monopolies, in order to remain internationally "competitive".
I have argued, as have others that since these centralized, information-gathering Tech Giants have been and continue to be heavily-subsidized by the US National Security establishment (with US Taxpayer funds), as the most amazing spying tools in history, they are already defacto utilities and should become formally recognized as such.
Either these Tech Giants are impartial public free-speech platforms or they are publishers. Legally, they need to clarify which of these they are to their users and stop with the You can't curate-out someone, like Alex Jones, with a hardcore following of at least 6 million people and call yourself an open, free-speech platform.
James Corbett says the Tech Giants are dying to be acquired by government entities and to be classified as public utilities. He also reminds us that we can simply #WalkAway from Facebook, Google, etc., the same way that many of us did from MySpace (remember them? There are still bikini pictures of me on there and I need to shut down that account, which I haven't visited in over a decade and it will take an hour of password recovery to do).
Truly, without us, these platforms are nothing, they are made of our user-generated data. We could make them dustify and drop at free-fall speed, like the WTC towers, if we wanted! Hahaha! We could all do this in one coordinated action, the same way that they de-platformed Alex Jones, if we so chose, or we could just mosey on out, on our own time and let these guys go out in a whimper.
Tell me what you'd like to do!
Going the regulatory route, Corbett reminds us that smashing monopolies, as happened with Standard Oil, only ended up creating more mirror-companies and more wealth for the shareholders. This may be why lawmakers have not enforced the Anti-Trust Act against Google, Facebook and others.
Who needs these bastards? I mean, really? Ask yourself if these companies represent a significant income and/or valuable social connectivity to you. If they're not serving you, why should you be serving them? Why should you be giving them so much data about yourself? Why should you be giving extra to the gargantuan surveillance apparatus of the Obama Administration?
The SGTReport recorded this roundtable of YouTube creators, in response to the deletion of Alex Jones' personhood, the incremental censorship and take-downs that they have been experiencing and how they propose to move forward.
Running Time: 60 mins
