Having seen waves of extreme over-reactions to Elon Musk's take-over of Twitter - and demands for all sorts of censorship being reinstated - we have seen an armada of virtue-signaling among advertisers pulling their spending from the free-speech platform.
In a New York Times op-ed, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, wrote Twitter under Musk's leadership is at risk of being removed from Apple and Google's app stores if they fail to follow guidelines:
"Failure to adhere to Apple's and Google's guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter's expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to get Twitter's services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes," Roth said.
He explained, "as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun."
...Elon Musk has just broken the news that, seemingly confirming the rumors, Apple is threatening to pull Twitter's app from its app-store... and won't say why...
Musk is not taking this lying down as one would expect, first questioning where Tim Cook hates free speech?
As it mulls kicking Elon Musk’s Twitter off the app store, it has now been revealed that Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, a move that harmed the organizational efforts of demonstrators protesting against the CCP’s lockdowns.....
...With Beijing now trying to contain what some are calling the most serious mass uprising since Tiananmen Square, Apple is apparently helping them to crush dissent.
Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, which protesters had been using to evade censorship.
AirDrop allows local connections between devices, meaning it cannot be monitored or censored by local authorities.
However, Apple launched an update to the app in China that restricted usage to just 10 minutes, making it harder for protesters to communicate with other activists, as well as send messages nearby bystanders and tourists.
After Chinese health officials announced an accelerating move to vaccinate older people against Covid-19, a sign the world's second-largest economy could be reopening after disastrous zero Covid policies, a new report says the metro area around the world's largest iPhone plant is set to loosen Covid restrictions.
Bloomberg reported Foxconn's massive iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, central China, is set to ease Covid control measures.
Meanwhile, whatever the justifiable criticism of Elon Musk for his transhumanism etc. he is stirring things up at Twitter which is becoming quite a happening place. I wouldn't give you 2c for Facebook, but the addicts will defend their use to the hilt.
Elon Musk said Monday that Twitter’s internal files on the company’s “free speech suppression” will be revealed “soon,” raising expectations that light will be shed on the circumstances around Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s explosive story that exposed information on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden.
Tesla head Elon Musk talks to the press as he arrives to have a look at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin on Sept. 3, 2020. (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” Musk said in a post late Monday.
The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …
Twitter will no longer enforce its Covid-19 misinformation policy, under which users who deviated from prevailing establishment narratives frequently had their accounts locked or suspended.
The longstanding policy did not apply to misinformation from government officials, who regularly lied about things such as transmission, masks, vaccine efficacy, side effects, or any of the other 'science' which turned out to be patently false.
Twitter did not officially announce the change, rather, the company added a note to a page on its website outlining its Covid-19 policy.
"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy," reads the note, which follows a line that still reads: "As the global community faces the COVID-19 pandemic together, Twitter is helping people find reliable information, connect with others, and follow what's happening in real time."
BREAKING: Twitter has stopped enforcing it’s COVID-19 Misinformation Policy as of November 23rd pic.twitter.com/iOsQsZnZLh
KING ZUCK: Facebook Global Planning Lead Reveals Need for Government Intervention
‘The Single Biggest Thing is this Company Needs to be Broken Up’...‘No King in the History of the World has been the Ruler of Two Billion People, but Mark Zuckerberg is'
Benny Thomas, Facebook Global Planning Lead: “I would break up Facebook, which means I would make less money probably -- but I don't care. Like that's what needs to be done. Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp -- they all need to be separate companies. It's too much power when they’re all one together.”
Thomas: “Most people don’t understand these things and most people don’t think about them -- which is why a lot of sh*t goes down because a lot of people aren’t paying attention.”
Thomas: “No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is -- and he’s 36. That’s too much for a 36-year-old. You should not have power over two billion people. I just think that’s wrong.”
Thomas: “There's always built-in [algorithmic] bias…Guess what? Human beings wrote that code.”
Thomas: “We’re re-looking at the algorithms, but it's such a massive and complicated thing that it takes time to fix it. Honestly, I think we need to bite the bullet and do it quicker, but you lose a lot of money as well if you do that.”
Thomas: “AI [Artificial Intelligence] is essentially evolving to become like human intelligence. Then, it’s going to go beyond human intelligence and at that point, humans are expendable.”
Thomas: “One of the things I worked on, which made me happy, was a voter registration drive…This is the kind of thing that you can only do with a company that has the sheer scale and reach of Facebook. We set ourselves a goal of registering four million new people and we went over that target.”
[NEW YORK – Mar. 15, 2021] Project Veritas released a new undercover video today in which Benny Thomas, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, revealed that Facebook has too much power and that government action is not only warranted but necessary to limit the damage the Big Tech giant does to society.
KING ZUCK: Facebook Global Planning Lead Reveals Need for Government Intervention: ‘The Single Biggest Thing is this Company Needs to be Broken Up’...‘No King in the History of the World has been the Ruler of Two Billion People, but Mark Zuckerberg is'
Thomas expressed his desire to see Big Tech companies held to account and laid out a vision for how to accomplish that goal.
“I would break up Facebook, which means I would make less money probably -- but I don't care. Like that's what needs to be done. Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp -- they all need to be separate companies. It's too much power when they’re all one together,” he said.
Thomas said he was concerned by the lack of public awareness around Facebook’s excessive power. He specifically mentioned the influence Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg exerts over the company.
“Most people don’t understand these things and most people don’t think about them -- which is why a lot of sh*t goes down because a lot of people aren’t paying attention,” Thomas said.
“No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is -- and he’s 36. That’s too much for a 36-year-old. You should not have power over two billion people. I just think that’s wrong,” he said.
“He [Zuckerberg] owns a controlling stake in the company. So, you can't do it the usual way that you do it in corporate, which is the board can just fire you, right? The board can’t do that to Zuck. The board can’t do that to Larry Page and Sergey Brin [Google] because they own too much of the company. They're too powerful. So, these are not companies anymore. These are countries,” he said.
Thomas said that Facebook’s algorithms are subject to human biases and stressed the importance of fixing the company’s algorithms and AI [Artificial Intelligence] sooner rather than later.
“There's always built-in [algorithmic] bias…Guess what? Human beings wrote that code,” he said.
“We’re re-looking at the algorithms, but it's such a massive and complicated thing that it takes time to fix it. Honestly, I think we need to bite the bullet and do it quicker, but you lose a lot of money as well if you do that,” he said.
“AI [Artificial Intelligence] is essentially evolving to become like human intelligence. Then, it’s going to go beyond human intelligence and at that point, humans are expendable…If you ever went to a picnic -- we would not spend one minute thinking about the ants that we stepped on the grass, right? From AI, we will become like those ants…So, I might be killing hundreds of ants when I walk in the park, I don’t know, and I don’t care. It’s not a thing that I care about. We will be like those ants,” he said.
Thomas admitted he was part of a Facebook project that pushed to register voters and said he believes Joe Biden benefited from it:
Benny Thomas, Facebook Global Planning Lead: “One of the things I worked on, which made me happy, was a voter registration drive. These are the kinds of things - this is the good side of Facebook. This is the kind of thing that you can only do with a company that has the sheer scale and reach of Facebook. We set ourselves a goal of registering four million new people and we went over that target, we did 4.5 [million]…”
Journalist: “Wow. Registering 4.5 million voters.”
Thomas: “It’s a lot.”
Journalist: “Yeah. I'm pretty sure he [Biden] won that way. What do you think?”
Thomas: “Exactly, I think so too.”
Project Veritas is currently working with multiple Big Tech insiders and encourages others to Be Brave and come forward to expose what is going on behind the scenes. Contact VeritasTips@protonmail.com with information or on Signal 914-653-3110.
The two-word Tweet from Elon Musk on Jan. 7 saying "Use Signal" has helped fuel millions in Signal and Telegram downloads. More importantly, Telegram, an instant messaging app with file transfer capabilities, has rocketed to the world's top app download.
Musk, the world's richest man, told his Twitter followers of more than 46 million to "Use Signal" last month amid concerns about an updated privacy policy for WhatApp.
On Jan. 12, days after Musk tweeted, Telegram said they "surpassed 500 million active users. 25 million new users joined in the last 72 hours: 38% came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America, and 8% from MENA."
Nearly one month later, Mobile analyst firm Sensor Tower reports Telegram was the most downloaded app in the world for January. Meanwhile, Signal placed third.
In December, Sensor Tower ranked Telegram at number 9 on the list, with WhatsApp at number 3. WhatsApp has since slid to the number 5 spot.
Sensor Tower estimates Telegram downloads are up 3.8 times from January 2020, with a massive 63 million last month.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov credited Telegram's success to "consistency" in a post on his Telegram channel.
"For the last 7.5 years, we've consistently defended the privacy of our users and regularly improved the quality and feature set of our apps," he said, suggesting "focused effort [applied] over a long period of time" would bring success, whether it be in "sport, blogging, art, coding, business or studying."
... and it wasn't just WhatsApp users migrating to Telegram. Many conservatives have been booted off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in an ideologically-driven purge by Silicon Valley, forcing many of them to find a new platform.
From Musk's tweet to conservatives finding a new home after being purged from traditional social media channels, it appears Telegram last month greatly benefited from the great migration.
In case you're wondering what makes Telegram so special - well - the company laid it out in a tweet:
"Some users like the unlimited cloud storage, some like the synced cross-platform apps, some like Telegram's dedication to privacy and security."
I have set up an account on Telegram
Given the fast- moving events of the last few days I have decided to join Telegram.
Parler has been taken down, Gab is quite possibly under threat and there are reports that Apple are removing Telegram from their AppStore and possibly removing it from people's phones if they have not changed the settings to NOT ALLOW Apple to do so.
I am seeing reports of Trump supporters being taken off planes or put on no-fly zones and today a report that HSCB is closing bank accounts of people who are against the wearing of masks.
Darkness is descending rapidly and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not even been inaugurated yet!
For anyone who thinks they might be exempt I would remind them of the following quote:
LEFT-LEANING researchers find NO ANTI-CONSERVATIVE BIAS on social media.
NYU's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights just issued a report that claims about 'anti-conservative' bias on social media platforms not only aren't true, but are a form of disinformation.
The researchers utilized a number of sources such as the democratic-leaning publication Politico and data analytics companies to find 'no concrete evidence' of conservative voices being censored on social media.
In fact, the study says, social media platforms actually AMPLIFIED the right-wingers with their algorithms to reach ‘unprecedented audiences’.
So clearly, conservatives are coming here to Telegram to get away from the fair and impartial treatment of Twitter.
FACEBOOK INSIDER LEAKS:
Zuckerberg & Execs Admit
Excessive Power
FULL LENGTH INTERNAL FACEBOOK Q & A 01-07-21
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO: “I know this is just a very difficult moment for a lot of us here [at Facebook], and especially our black colleagues. It was troubling to see how people in this [Capitol] mob were treated compared to the stark contrast we saw during [Black Lives Matter] protests earlier this [past] year.”
Zuckerberg: “The president [Trump] intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power.”
Zuckerberg: “President Biden already issued a number of Executive Orders on areas that we as a company care quite deeply about and have for some time. Areas like immigration, preserving DACA, ending restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, as well as other Executive Orders on climate and advancing racial justice and equity. I think these were all important and positive steps.”
Zuckerberg: “We also have the first woman and the first person of color as our vice president in the history of our country…The swearing in of Vice President Harris really stands as a reminder that despite the challenges that we are facing as a country, we all have so much to be proud of.”
Nick Clegg, Facebook Head of Global Affairs: “There has been quite a lot of disquiet expressed by many leaders around the world…ideally we wouldn’t be making these [censorship] decisions on our own, we would be making these decisions in line with our own conformity, with democratically agreed rules and principles. At the moment, those democratically agreed rules don’t exist. We still have to make decisions in real-time.”
Facebook Insider still works within the organization and is willing to continue exposing its corruption.
[MENLO PARK, Calif. – Jan. 31, 2021] Project Veritas released a new video today leaked by a brave Facebook insider exposing CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives admitting to the company’s wide-ranging powers to censor political speech and promote partisan objectives.
In a Jan. 7 video, Zuckerberg is seen accusing then-President Trump of subverting the republic.
“It’s so important that our political leaders lead by example, make sure we put the nation first here, and what we’ve seen is that the president [Trump] has been doing the opposite of that…The president [Trump] intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power,” Zuckerberg said.
“His [Trump’s] decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters in the Capitol I think has rightly bothered and disturbed people in the US and around the world,” he said.
Zuckerberg also insinuated that Capitol protesters received better treatment than Black Lives Matter protesters.
“I know this is just a very difficult moment for a lot of us here, and especially our black colleagues. It was troubling to see how people in this [Capitol] mob were treated compared to the stark contrast we saw during protests earlier this [past] year,” he said.
Guy Rosen, Facebook's VP of Integrity, described how the platform targets speech it deems dangerous.
"We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where our systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence... these are all things we've built over the past three-four years as part of our investments into the integrity space our efforts to protect the election," Rosen said.
In a video recorded on Jan. 21, the Facebook CEO said it was significant to see Kamala Harris assume the duties of Vice President of the United States.
“Yesterday [Jan. 20] was truly a historic day. The past few weeks have certainly been a very difficult time in our nation. But we got our new president [Biden]. We also have the first woman and the first person of color as our vice president in the history of our country,” he said.
“The swearing in of Vice President Harris really stands as a reminder that despite the challenges that we are facing as a country, we all have so much to be proud of,” he said.
Zuckerberg praised Biden and his political agenda.
“I thought President Biden’s inaugural address was very good,” Zuckerberg said.
“In his first day, President Biden already issued a number of Executive Orders on areas that we as a company care quite deeply about and have for some time,” he said. “Areas like immigration, preserving DACA, ending restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, as well as other Executive Orders on climate and advancing racial justice and equity. I think these were all important and positive steps.”
In the same Jan. 21 meeting, Facebook’s Head of Global Affairs Nick Clegg addressed the international backlash that resulted from then-President Trump’s suspension from the platform.
“There has been quite a lot of disquiet expressed by many leaders around the world, from the President of Mexico to Alexei Navalny in Russia, and Chancellor Angela Merkel and others saying, ‘well this shows that private companies have got too much power...’ we agree with that,” he said.
“Ideally, we wouldn’t be making these decisions on our own, we would be making these decisions in line with our own conformity, with democratically agreed rules and principles. At the moment, those democratically agreed rules don’t exist. We still have to make decisions in real-time.”
Facebook's VP of Civil Rights, Roy Austin, said that the company's products should reflect their views on race.
“I wonder whether or not we can use Oculus to help a white police officer to understand what it feels like to be a young black man who’s stopped and searched and arrested by the police…I want every major decision to run through a civil rights lens,” Austin said.
The videos leaked to Project Veritas by the Facebook insider illustrate the prevalence of partisan views and the lack of diversity of thought within the organization.
Project Veritas is releasing the full recordings these quotes were obtained from. View them on our YouTube Channel.
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
Glenn Greenwald
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.
Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that's what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, "acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple's customers." The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors' access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Timesthat the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recodereported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.
Posts
