I
warned yesterday all the people who were celebrating the attack on
Alex Jones that it wouldn’t stop there.
Bingo!
The
Crackdown Continues: Twitter Suspends Libertarian Accounts, Including
Ron Paul Institute Director
7
August, 2018
One
day after what appeared to be a coordinated attack by media giants
Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Google on Alex Jones, whose various
social media accounts were banned or suspended in a matter of hours,
the crackdown against alternative media figures continued as several
Libertarian figures, including the Ron Paul Institute director, found
their Twitter accounts suspended.
On
Monday, Twitter suspended the editorial director of antiwar.com Scott
Horton, former State Department employee Peter Van Buren, and Dan
McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute.
Horton
was reportedly disciplined for the use of "improper language"
against journalist Jonathan M. Katz, he said in a brief statement,
while McAdams was suspended for retweeting him, he said. Past tweets
in both accounts were available to the public at the time of the
writing, unlike the account of Van Buren, which was fully suspended.
According
to TargetLiberty,
Horton and McAdams fell
victim of
Twitter’s suspension algorithm after objecting to Katz’s quarrel
with Van Buren over an earlier interview.
The
suspensions come days after Twitter suspended black conservative
Candace Owen from Twitter for highlighting the algorithmic hypocrisy of
Twitter by replacing the word “white” with “Jewish” in a series of
tweets modeled on those by New York Times editor Sarah Jeong.
just
after controversial conservative Alex Jones, and his podcast InfoWars,
were kicked out from most social media platforms, prompting conservative
to accuse the social networks of collusion in a collective crackdown on
non-mainstream voices. The Silicon Valley giants were criticized by the
US political establishment for failing to prevent alleged Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, critics now
say the pressured media giants are engaging in political censorship,
using their market dominance and lack of legislated neutrality
requirements to target descent voices ahead of the midterm elections.
* * *
In a scathing op-ed on Tuesday, Nigel
Farage wrote that "while many on the libertarian right and within the
conservative movement have their issues with Alex Jones and InfoWars,
this week’s announcement by YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify represents
a concerted effort of proscription and censorship that could just as
soon see any of us confined to the dustbin of social media history."
These
platforms that claim to be “open” and in favor of “free speech” are now
routinely targeting -- whether by human intervention or not -- the
views and expressions of conservatives and anti-globalists.
This
is why they no longer even fit the bill of “platforms.” They are
publishers in the same way we regard news outlets as publishers. They
may use more machine learning and automation, but their systems clearly
take editorial positions. We need to hold them to account in the same
way we do any other publisher.
Farage then accused social media giants of being corporatist:
That
they cannot profess to be neutral, open platforms while being
illiberal, dictatorial, and hiding behind the visage of a private
corporation (which are more often than not in bed with governments
around the world at the very highest levels).
This isn’t capitalism. It’s corporatism.
He
concludes that the real interference in "US democracy" comes not from
Russia, but from some of its most powerful corporations which now yield
more power in some cases than the government itself: "This isn’t “liberal democracy” as they keep pretending. It’s autocracy."
"...for those that don’t take issue with the latest censorship of right-wingers by big social media -- unless we take a stand now, who knows where it could end."
Twitter
Suspends Peter Van
Buren Forever
7
August, 2018
Some
readers are aware I have been permanently suspended from Twitter as
@wemeantwell.
This
followed exchanges with several mainstream journalists over their
support for America’s wars and unwillingness to challenge the lies
of government. After two days of silence, Twitter sent me an
auto-response saying what I wrote “harasses, intimidates, or uses
fear to silence someone else’s voice.”
I
don’t think I did any of that, and I wish you didn’t have to
accept my word on it. I wish instead you could read what I wrote and
decide for yourself. But Twitter won’t allow that. Twitter says you
cannot read and make up your own mind. They have in fact eliminated
all the things I have ever written there over seven years,
disappeared me down the Memory Hole. That’s what censorship does;
it takes the power to decide what is right and wrong away from you
and gives it to someone else.
Hate
what I write, hate me, block me, don’t buy my books, but please
don’t celebrate handing over those choices to some company.
I
lost my career at the State Department because I spoke out as a
whistleblower against the Iraq War. I’ve now been silenced, again,
for speaking out, this time by a corporation. I am living in the
America I always feared.
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