Obama: "And let's raise our glasses and toast to that."
/2012%2F12%2F04%2F16%2Fobamatoasts.cQ0.jpg)
Posted on 08/06/2018 3:31:05 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
Conservative media is ramping up its battle with Facebook after the platform banned Alex Jones’s Infowars website from its platform.
Conservative sites questioned whether Jones was being signaled out because of his politics, and whether Apple and other tech companies that have also censored Jones were abusing their power.
The Drudge Report’s banner headline for most of Monday was “Apple regulates hate.” It also included a link high on its site to the conservative Gateway Pundit site that said: “Are Tech Giants Working Together to Censor Conservatives?”
Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson criticized Facebook's decision as political censorship.”
“This is a co-ordinated move ahead of the mid-terms to help Democrats. This is political censorship. This is culture war,” Watson tweeted.
Prominent right-wing internet figure Laura Loomer also decried the bans.
“Infowars played a big role in helping @realDonaldTrump get elected. BIG TECH is currently trying to influence elections by banning Conservatives. I'm actually depressed,” she tweeted.
Facebook on Monday said that it had decided to take down Infowars and its founder Jones’s pages because they violated company policies.
“[U]pon review, we have taken [the pages] down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies,” Facebook wrote in its post on the matter.
Spotify and Apple had already booted Infowars from their platforms. After Facebook’s announcement, YouTube said that it too would ban Alex Jones’s channel from its site, after he tried to circumvent his 90-day livestream ban by directing users to his livestreams on other video platforms.
Facebook had faced criticism for allowing Jones remain on the site, despite his pushing of conspiracy theories — including that the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, in which 20 school children were killed, was staged. He has also said that the survivors of a shooting earlier this year at a high school in Parkland, Fla., were “crisis actors.”
The company’s move on Monday to boot Infowars from its platform earned it praise from high-profile celebrities and politicians, such as Chelsea Handler and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)
“[Facebook, Apple and YouTube] are private companies that shouldn’t knowingly spread lies and hate. They took a good first step today by removing Infowars,” Murphy tweeted.
Reaction to the move was not unanimous, however, and on the left and the right there was some criticism of Facebook for censoring anyone using their platforms.
Congressional Republicans previously have raised fears about conservatives being banned from social media platforms.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has repeatedly slammed major technology companies, claiming that they’re biased against technology companies.
Axios reported last week that McCarthy had written a letter to House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) pushing to have Twitter testify about anti-conservative bias on its platform, following a Vice News report alleging that conservatives were being “shadow banned” on Twitter, because some Republican lawmakers names did not appear in the autocomplete search results.
“Any solution to this problem must start with accountability from companies like Twitter, whose platforms have enormous potential to impact the national conversation — and unfortunately, enormous potential for abuse,” McCarthy said in the letter.
McCarty had also hammered Google in May after the website’s “knowledge panel,” which displays facts on about things users search, showed “Nazism” among the California GOP’s ideologies.
In May, Facebook said that it would start an anti-conservative bias review led by former GOP Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.). As a part of the review, company executives also met with officials from the conservative Heritage Foundation.
In June, Twitter, conducted a set of quiet meetings with Republicans to hear them out as well.
Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, argued the initial hesitancy by Facebook and other tech companies to boot Jones shows they are taking concerns of bias seriously.
“I think in some ways the Infowars case reinforces how sensitive tech companies are to conservative concerns,” Miller said. “The fact that this was a drawn-out process shows that tech companies are taking this seriously. They don't want to turn off conservatives. Conservatives use their product.”
If we don't call them out for their censorship and fight for our place on social media platforms we will be shut out.
Again, I'm not calling for legislation but we have to document what they're doing and let them explain what they're doing and why.
Time to start a competing company and dethrone the tech socialists all together.
Alex Jones is a whack job, performance artist but, these firms used him as a guinea pig to gauge the response when the begin “disappearing” the rest of us.
Oh, they are dedKcuF up for removing that posting from the gal running for Congress.
It was uplifting.
(Rush played a clip this morning)
To H3ll with that. I'm calling for legislation. Here is what Styx has to say on the subject, and I agree with him, even though he seems like a hippie to me.
Remember, there are layers and layers of editorial oversight. Right.
Sure, all we need is about half a trillion dollars.
Obama: "And let's raise our glasses and toast to that."
This would take billions to setup.
Google runs most of the server farms for FB.
Now is it a good idea?
Sure is but unlikely to be completed anytime soon
Not really - AOL was unstoppable at one time... MySpace would never fail... yahoo was the king of search...
Software is cheap - just need the will.
Exactly.
That’s the only thing that is going to fix this.
Waving around threats to break companies up or regulate them as “utilities” because we were too lazy to keep tech options diverse years ago, and too stupid to not worship these bastards when they were rising up (looking at you FR Apple fanboys), is not going to happen. It isnt legal, constitutional, and it will come back to bite us in the ass.
Will it take money? Yes. Will it take people putting in sometime with no pay and not expecting a big cash payoff for a long time? Yup.
But 14 years ago the internet was awash in options, and it was BETTER OFF, so now we are going to have to start the long walk now.
None of them ever got so big as Google. Call it a phenomena like "Escape velocity." Google is so big, and has it's fingers in so many pies, it isn't going to get toppled unless governments attack it.
Cancelled my Facebook account today. Felt great. Checked the “Other” box for the reason I closed the account. A great screed. I’m sure they won’t read it.
Have tried https://brave.com/?
Letting them control speech is what is going to come back and bite us in the @$$.
At this point I don't give a sh*t about "constitutional" arguments. This is a real threat, and if you think it's going to go away by some magic coders working in a garage somewhere, you are foolish.
The framers of the constitution never envisioned this, and if they had, I dare say they wouldn't have tolerated it.
But 14 years ago the internet was awash in options, and it was BETTER OFF, so now we are going to have to start the long walk now.
It won't take them that much time to rig the elections by censoring all opposition. Once they get control of the government, then they will make their "hate speech" excuse enforced on all of us by law.
“Sure, all we need is about half a trillion dollars. “
You keep saying this in multiple posts almost as if you have no idea how tech startups actually work. Like what are you looking for 4K HD streaming video in 7.1 channel surround sound?
12+ years ago we had Podcasts, Real Audio, and sites like Stage 6, services like ICQ, MySpace, LiveJournal, GeoCities, Usenet, and many others.
Not to be crass, but either you start somewhere and build or learn to shut the hell up and stop whining. Those are your choices.
Aside from googles cash horde it really only has one other thing - it’s ad system. Its search engine and mail service is really a money sink and a way to drive people to their ads - it’s their ad system that everyone’s tied into and keeps the spice flowing.
Come up with an alternative ad system to deliver ads to web pages that’s more lucrative for the users and google will fold like the house of cards it is.
I tried it once before, but at the time it didn't appear to be available for Windows XP. After looking further at the site, I think I found a link to download a version that might work on my machine. I'm giving it a try now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.