Thursday, January 25, 2018

"How to fight for freedom in the Left’s social media gulag"

At Front Page Magazine, Oleg Atbashian, founder of the satirical blog The People's Cube, writes about FACEBOOK-GOOGLE-TWITTER 1984
How to fight for freedom in the Left’s social media gulag.
Just last week I read a story by John Hawkins, How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It, where the author announced that he'd been forced to shut down his Right Wing News website and explained that in today's social media environment, a conservative's chances to get a political website off the ground are infinitesimal.

Then I read a story on The Daily Caller about Google having an actual secret speech police that blocks, demonetizes, and otherwise censors conservative content.

Then I received a screenshot from one of my readers, who is a U.S. Army officer, showing that my People's Cube has been blocked by the DoD Enterprise-Level Protection System - not because of our silly anti-Left humor, but because of "hate and racism" - a blatantly false label, probably transferred from one of the blacklists shared by social media and the government (or at least the Deep State part of it). I've recently written about it in FrontPage Mag.

And just this morning, I received dozens of messages from my readers that Facebook wasn't allowing them to post or share any People's Cube links.

...Throughout history, the human mind has been our main tool of survival. To live, we depend on accurate information about our surroundings. This makes the objective truth a basic human need. Truthful information is as essential to our existence as food, shelter, and clothing. In societies where information is distorted and suppressed by totalitarian governments, people usually die in large numbers.

But information can also be a commercial product, bought and sold at market prices by specialized organizations that have amassed great fortunes in doing so. Good for them. However, as the historian Robert Conquest pointed out, "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." And the Left by default is prone to manipulate information in a way that suits its agenda at the expense of the general population.

Leftists in the government are obsessed with regulating all products and services, essential or not. They'd like to regulate information as well - see the Fairness Doctrine and Net Neutrality. Conservatives have always instinctively opposed that trend, guided by the principle, "Whatever the Left does, we must do the opposite." This kneejerk impulse to take the "diametrically opposite position" has often allowed the Left to toy with conservatives and lure them into absurd situations where they fought phantom causes. In part, due to such "diametrical" thinking, the anti-regulation conservatives withdrew themselves from the regulatory process, effectively giving the Left free reign in shaping government regulations.

Enter Donald J. Trump. Right off the bat he introduces what I call "perpendicular thinking," meaning that instead of jumping to the opposite, he goes vaguely perpendicular. This disorients the Left (as well as some anti-Trump "diametrical" conservatives), forcing them to take unpopular and ridiculous positions on the opposite side of his choosing. And while Trump is beating the Left at their own game, keeping them confused and unable to deal with their new role of the "diametrical opposition," we should move in and do some "perpendicular" regulation.

At the same time, the product called "information" is regulated in the exactly opposite fashion. It is being filtered, altered, rejected, or exaggerated according to arbitrary and subjective markers and biases, creating a distorted and fraudulent picture of reality. If a food manufacturer tried to label his products the same way, he would be sued out of existence. Imagine buying fruit juice labeled with 0% sugar instead of the actual 100% and 100% of vitamin C instead of the actual 0%.

This clearly falls into the jurisdiction of the newly reformed Bureau of Consumer Protection, whose stated goal is to stop unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices by:

collecting complaints and conducting investigations
suing companies and people that break the law
developing rules to maintain a fair marketplace
educating consumers and businesses about their rights and responsibilities.

Some have proposed to regulate the Internet through the FCC, but that is fraught with equating the web with a public utility, which is subject to government rationing of free speech - a pitfall avoided by the recent repeal of Net Neutrality.

In contrast, the Bureau of Consumer Protection would treat the Internet as a marketplace for commercial products, one of which is information. Instead of regulating free speech, it would protect consumers against fraud.

On June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered unconstitutional any restriction of speech based on the so-called "hate speech" allegations, unanimously reaffirming that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. Justice Anthony Kennedy explains this decision as follows:

A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government's benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.

And yet, the unconstitutional and deceptively named "hate speech" gimmick is being excessively used to suppress conservative and libertarian speech by social media moderators and by algorithms embedded in FacebookGoogleTwitter code. The same gimmick is also being widely used today by speech police in many organizations, including educational and government entities, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Media giants may beg to differ and remind us of their status as private companies that can make their own internal rules. But if their main product is information, which has an existential value to our society, they can no more hide behind their private status than the landlords or mortgage bankers can.

That means that FacebookGoogleTwitter and other media giants can be forced by law to discard their manipulative "hate speech" and other ideological filters and to allow a free flow of information lest they be sued by the Bureau of Consumer Protection for violating consumer rights. Wikipedia can be sued for its grotesquely biased suppression and misrepresentation of political reality, which creates a very skewed image of the world. For added entertainment value, CNN with its "Facts First" brand campaign can probably also be sued for false advertisement.

Unhinged hateful rhetoric coming from the Left never gets to be branded "hate speech," nor is it ever blocked on social media. This alone makes the "hate speech" label meaningless and exposes the one-sided ideological agenda behind it. Of course, no logical argument will ever convince the leftist agenda-driven "hate speech police" to give up their dominance over the national debate voluntarily. Instead, this unethical practice must be outlawed legislatively, as an unconstitutional impediment to free exchange of information.

If we outlaw the corrupt system of "hate speech" policing, it will do a lot more than just free up the Internet and the rest of the media. It will pull the rug from under various demagogues who profit from the harassment of conservatives. It will clear many honest people of libelous allegations. It will demolish the sordid cottage industry of "hate speech watchers," like the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose fundraising is directly proportional to how many honorable people they can defame as "haters" and who compile dubious blacklists, which are then used as guidance by FacebookGoogleTwitter and the mainstream media to silence or disparage conservative figures.

Social media should certainly continue to block real spam and clickbait sites with fake news (they do exist). The trick is that online reprobates aren't likely to file a complaint and seek government protection from being blocked - unlike legitimate content providers who can and should request an investigation if they are being suppressed. Terrorist messaging can be dealt with by working with law enforcement professionals, not with SPLC and similar amateurs who have a shady agenda.

Before conservatives are erased from the Internet, legal minds in the conservative movement had better select an appropriate case of content suppression and stage an exemplary class action lawsuit that would create a seminal precedent for all future cases. If no legal ground for such a lawsuit exists, we must work with our legislators to create it.

Conservatives who are philosophically opposed to regulation may not like this method, but realistically and objectively, this seems to be the least worst solution to get out of the memory hole designated for us by the leftist media giants.

People on our side should stop pretending that we are not in the middle of an all-out war waged by the Left against conservative media. We won't survive if we continue to react to leftist attacks by lying down and taking positions whose only value is in being diametrically opposite to those of the attackers. It's time we went perpendicular.
Read more here.

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