BPEarthWatch Banned from YT. Who's Next?
The
war on free speech, alternative and conservative media continues.
BPearthwatch has been banned from YT. Who will be the next victim?
gab.com & the Great Purge on the Horizon
Kit Knightly
31
October, 2018
gab.com
is an alternative social network, set up and launched in 2016. It’s
founder, Andrew Torba, stated he wanted to create a home for free
speech, and counter what he perceived
as “liberal bias” on
other platforms, such as twitter and facebook.
Two
days ago, their website was taken down. This was in response to being
blocked by PayPal, and then having their server space taken away by
their hosting service. gab’s founder posted this
statement on
their stripped-down website.
Why
did this happen?
Because
Robert Bowers, the alleged gunman at the synagogue shooting in
Pittsburgh, had a gab account and posted some things about “the
jews” on it.
Is
it right, or sensible to punish a platform for the (alleged) actions
of ONE user out of 100,000s? And is that really what’s going on?
Robert
Bowers also had a Twitter account. And a Facebook page. Neither of
these platforms has faced punishment, or censure, from any quarter.
Cesar
Sayoc – the alleged MAGABomber – also had a twitter account and
allegedly sent threatening messages to some public figures on it.
Again, Twitter has not been blocked by PayPal.
In
fact, Twitter and Facebook – though occasionally criticised for
“not doing enough to combat hate”, have never been blocked, or
threatened in any way. Even though twitter hosted countless pro-ISIS
accounts,
regularly cited
in the media.
So
clearly, it can be reasoned, PayPal et al are not only responding to
the alleged statements of Robert Bowers. There is a deeper agenda at
work.
In
fact, this isn’t the first time larger internet companies have
tried to stymie gab’s existence. When they were first launched, in
2016, Apple denied them a place in their app store because they
allegedly allowed pornography to be posted. When gab installed a
filter to block people posting pornography, Apple again denied them
access to the app store, this time for breaching their “hate
speech” regulations. Google Play did the same in 2017 (reminder –
Google allowed ISIS
to release their own app on
their marketplace).
Early
this year a cross-university
study conducted
on gab (and other “alt-right” sites) found that gab.com used
“free speech as shield to protect their “alt-right” views”.
(I’m not sure what, if anything, that sentence really means. Surely
free speech is a shield protecting all speech? Isn’t that the
point?)
In
April this year VICE magazine ran an article headlined “Gab
Is the Alt-Right Social Network Racists Are Moving to”.
It was resoundingly negative about the site, painting it as nothing
but a home for racism and “conspiracy theorists”, despite the
owner’s protestations that gab is all about free speech, and that
anyone is free to join.
Logically,
the emergence of networks like gab was inevitable. The internet has
always been that way, you shut down one hallway and four more are
forced open. Look at Piratebay, notionally banned, yet available
through a million different proxies that spring up faster than
governments can shut them down.
Social
media has undergone unprecedented purges this year. Alex Jones
was banned
across virtually every mainstream platform.
Hundreds of facebook pages and twitter accounts were shut down on
spurious grounds – allegations of being “Kremlin
backed” or “Iran
bots” fly
around, without any supporting evidence ever being released to the
public. This summer, twitter blocked millions of “fake
accounts” (we
covered that here).
These
actions aren’t independent, either. Alex Jones was banned from
multiple platforms, all within 24 hours. Just earlier this
month, Facebook
unpublished over 800 pages,
whilst twitter blocked the accounts of the same pages…all on the
same day. Clearly, the companies are either co-ordinating with each
other (possibly in breach of anti-trust laws), or are receiving
directions from the same source – almost certainly the government.
In
that climate, new platforms were always going to emerge. It’s the
classic “Well
then I’m gonna build my own theme park, with blackjack and
hookers” situation.
YouTube
is increasingly corporate, controlled and fake. Demonetising user
videos and adding more and more
advertisements…so dtube and bitchute open.
Twitter censors your free-speech, so we’ll start up a platform
where you can say what you want.
Twitter
and Facebook both saw their stock-prices tumble as a result of their
respective “purges”. So, is the anti-gab movement simply a case
of mega-corporations protecting their monopoly by shutting down a
budding rival? Is this all just about control of the market and
money?
Unfortunately,
it seems not. Like the vast majority of media roll-outs, it seems
this is a convergence of interests – financial on the one hand, and
political on the other.
The
push to ban the “alt-right” – or, the even broader term –
“hate speech” has been on-going for several years now. It will
inevitably pick up in the wake of the events of this week.
Within
hours, predictable voices were discussing the “necessary
limitations on free speech”:
The #Pittsburgh synagogue terror attack is a reminder of the necessary limits of free speech. Hate speech leads to acts of hatred.
Paul
Mason, writing in the New Statesman, argued that YouTube
needs to censor all the “alt-right” on
their platform.
It’s
a two-step process – having first established the need to “limit”
hate speech, we can then move on to defining what “hate speech”
really means.
They’ve
started on that already. Criticising George Soros is “anti-semitic”
now.
As is the term “neocons”:
What
else will be deemed hate speech? What does “hate speech” really
mean? The simple answer to that is: Whatever
they want it to mean.
It
seems like there’s a purge coming, you can feel it in the wind. A
purge motivated by the greed of multinational companies wielding
power that rivals nations, and fuelled by the fascistic need of the
“powers-that-shouldn’t-be” to limit and control our
existence…just because they can.
It
is both authoritarian power grab, and a manifestation of corporate
greed. It’s amazing how often those two things come together.
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