From Pax Dickinson: I TOLD YOU SO: TWITTER’S CRACKDOWN ON FREE SPEECH
and from Social Matter This Week in Reaction (2016/02/21)
Twitter’s House, Twitter’s Rules. One could hope Twitter might enforce their terms of service fairly without a view to the orthodoxy of the opinions expressed. But Twitter is under no moral or legal obligation to do so. Who are we kidding? It’s their house. They’ll do what they want. Don’t let the door bruise your arse on the way out if you don’t like it. – See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/02/23/this-week-in-reaction-20160221/#sthash.Gy9ji2zD.dpuf
Hmmm…even though I agree Twitter censorship is becoming problematic, Twitter, being a private company, has discretion to to whatever it wants within the law, so while we may be mad that they are disabling right-wing speech, it is within their right to do so. Way back in early 2015 during the Ellen Pao Reddit upheaval, I predicted censorship would become a problem and I implored the ‘right’ to create and run their own social media and content platforms instead of depending on a third parties that can pull the plug without warning. When Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, or Facebook deletes your profile, everything is irrevocably lost. You lose any followers, search rankings, all content, and, most importantly, your username/handle. Grey Enlightenment content is always backed-up, and the domain is not going anywhere. It costs money to do this, but it’s a small price to pay to not have near total control over your content.
The problem is ‘free speech’ does not apply to the private sector, only the public, which given the size and importance of the private sector, is becoming quite limited. The Constitution would have to be amended, to include a clause protecting some or all private sector free speech, voiding the bulwark that has historically separated the two sectors.
Some on the ‘alt right’ also seem to have a fixation on preserving free speech, while also opposing democracy, and I don’t think this contradiction is logically consistent. We need to choose one. A reactionary state cannot, by definition, have a 1st Amendment (or equivalent).
But that doesn’t change the fact that the left are hypocrites, preaching the virtues of ‘free speech’, tolerance, and democracy while silencing speech they oppose.
From Reactionary Future:
Liberalism is acid, it is cancer, it is the most hideous disaster to befall mankind and until it is stopped completely, the disaster will continue its work. Enough of these abstract and contextless values such as liberty, equality and freedom. Enough of the fraud.
Free speech and assembly may be limited to persona autonomy.
As for Twitter, they don’t need us (the dissident right). Twitter is morphing into a broadcasting company, where a couple hundreds or so popular Twitter accounts post updates to their millions of followers, much like TV, where millions passively consume the output of a handful of creators. Celebrities can broadcast tour dates and new releases. TV studios can broadcast new shows and schedules. Sports teams can broadcast scores and rosters. Like cable TV, deep-pocketed advertisers can buy ‘sponsored Tweets’ in these broadcasts, to be seen by millions of followers. Content on TV tends to be much more nuanced than on the internet, and Twitter is moving that way, too, in suspending and ghosting potentially controversial accounts and hashtags. Performing cost analysis, Twitter executives determined that the pageviews and ad-impressions from controversial content is a trivial compared to Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez/CNN pablum.