This morning, President Trump took to Twitter to lambaste the Social Media Mafia that is gradually, but inexorably, squeezing conservative voices from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It is about time.

Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

While a lot of energy has been expended on the treatment of Alex Jones’s bizarre little media empire, there is actually a much larger issue. Or rather two of them.

The main issue is that no matter what Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg think is happening, their platforms–and that word is important–is engaged in extreme and pervasive viewpoint discrimination. Yesterday, Prager University reported on several of its videos being blocked and there were widespread reports of Facebook not allowing any Prager U posts to appear in the timelines of subscribers. There are many other instances:

Almost a year ago, an employee noticed a YouTube video at the top of a “Doug Wead” search and wondered how it got there. It wasn’t related to the date, the view count, or anything else that they could determine. But since it was there, at Google’s omniscient discretion, we decided to do something we had never done before: buy an ad to promote it. That’s when our troubles began.

Within days, Google blocked my ad and informed my team that we had violated their policies. I called Google. The problem, they explained, was that the video had hate speech.

It was a Fox Business News video with Trish Regan interviewing me about the Russian collusion investigation. The Google employee could not find the exact offending words, but referred me to various other supervisors up the ladder.

It took much of the day listening to elevator music as I waited, playing “Civilization V” interspersed by brief conversations with successive employees reciting Google policies that they admitted explained nothing. We concluded I should re-submit the ad and whoever was offended at Google would be forced to surface.

Once again my ad was blocked, and this time my Google account was suspended. I felt like Roseanne Barr. Once again I called Google and spent a day trying to figure out what was wrong. “This call may be monitored,” they announced, and I announced back that I would do the same. So the discussion began. Was I too nice to President Trump? Should I have been more critical? Was it something Regan had said? She seems to fairly cover all sides of an issue. Why would they have a problem with her?

Google employees appeared to be baffled. Could they call me back tomorrow, they asked? The next day, Nurse Ratched at Google finally emerged. I was never given her name, but conversations with her employees indicated her sex. It was nothing that I or Regan had said in the video, her team explained. Huh?

No, no, the problem, I was told, was in the “crawler of words along the bottom of the video.” It was a quote of Trump declaring that the Robert Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt.” This was apparently hate speech.

Hmmm. You’re saying to me that words from the duly elected president of the United States cannot be shown on YouTube—words that have already been printed in The New York Times? I did my best to play along with the wisdom of this Silicon Valley logic, imparted to me by kind Google employees from India. What time is it over there?

…

A viral YouTube interview with me and Fox Anchor Neil Cavuto about why Hillary Clinton lost the election was penalized. The video had more than 861,000 views and was earning an average of 15,000 views a day when it suddenly went dark. On February 17, after the new censorship took hold, this video dropped to 50 views a day. That is where it has stayed ever since.

Likewise, a viral YouTube interview with me and “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade about the election, a video that had 961,000 views and was clicking off 20,000 views a day, suddenly dropped to 30. It all happened in one day. And it has stayed there ever since.

.@YouTube has added a disclaimer to my global warming video, saying: "evidence show[s] that the climate system is warming."

I say that in my video, too. But does YouTube really need to inject its opinion? Is there no room for nuance?https://t.co/yvSuiUj6j6

— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) August 15, 2018

As I’ve posted on twice (here | here) Facebook and then Twitter have banned a campaign commercial for a candidate for the US House of Representatives. This action is somewhere between borderline and blatantly illegal as federal law forbids censoring, editing, or refusing to run campaign ads. The only question here is whether Facebook and Twitter have to obey the same law as newspapers, radio, and television.

What is happening here is that these social media platforms are trying to have their cake and eat it both. Under the Communications Decency Act, these platforms were given safe harbor from liability for illegal materials being disseminated by them. This gave them a protection publishers do not have. They are now, in the service of leftwing ideology, trying to act a de facto publishers, by controlling content viewpoint, while, at the same time, demanding the immunity of their platform status.

The second thing going on is that the right leaning media is beset with poseurs and quislings who misrepresent what is going on and used adherence to alleged principles to encourage the major social media platforms to put competitors and those they consider to be less worthy out of business. Whenever a supposed conservative tells you, “Alex Jones is not the hill to die on,” you should immediately know who you are dealing with. You’ve either got a moron who doesn’t understand what is happening or you have an elitist who sneers at people who aren’t quite as good as they are and is sure that they will never be subjected to having their business destroyed by those making these decisions.

To the left, not just the militant SJW left but to the garden-variety-gets-their-views-from-the-NYT-editorial-page leftist, there is literally zero difference between Alex Jones and the American Enterprise Institute. So when you throw Alex Jones under the bus, you are doing nothing more than keeping the crocodile from eating you right now, your distaste for Jones, notwithstanding.

That Facebook and Twitter can pull a candidate’s campaign ad and demand they edit it before it can be distributed should terrify everyone and demonstrate to us all just how fragile the ability to use social media is for those with unpopular views.

My personal view is that the social media platforms have demonstrated they are rapacious monopolies on the model of Standard Oil of the late 19th century. At a minimum, Google, Facebook, and Twitter need to be forced to spin off their advertising sales businesses and their tech development businesses into separate, independent entities. They also need to be forced to either act as platforms or act as publishers. They are either responsible for their content and are able to control it…or they are free from liability for what is distributed on their platform but they can no longer make any judgments on user content or conduct.

It is great that President Trump is aware of this and he seems exercised enough that he may not forget about it.

=========
=========
Like what you see? Then visit my story archive.
Follow @streiffredstate

I’m on Facebook. Drop by and join the fun there.
=========
=========