Twitter has initiated a major purge of prominent accounts associated with the alt-right exactly a week after GOP President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory.
One of the first and most prominent accounts caught up in the deletion is Richard Spencer, president and director of the National Policy Institute, an alt-right think tank focused on white identity and related policy issues…
Paul Town, one of the alt-right trolls responsible for feeding Olivia Nuzzi at The Daily Beast a false and outlandish narrative on how Pepe the cartoon frog came to be associated with white nationalism, was also suspended.
Other suspended users, among many, include Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers — all notable alt-right accounts.
Then there is google and facebook, banning “fake news:”
During the past week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome.
On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources.
Google kicked off the action Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its ad policy, which already said it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.
Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of Media and Communications at Merrimack College collected all the websites she could find which were ‘false, misleading or clickbait’.
Here they are…
•ProjectVeritas
•BeforeItsNews.com…
•InfoWars…
•Red State…
•Breitbart…
•LewRockwell.com…
•World Net Daily…
•ZeroHedge
Project Veritas is literally just videos of reality. Congrats to Zerohedge for making the list. Little disappointed we did not, but there is always next year.
The truth is, this is an issue of monopoly and antitrust. These companies are using their monopolies to shut out competing platforms, and then unfairly affecting other businesses which depend on their monopolized services for promotion.
There has to be a way for the Justice Department to move in and force companies like facebook and twitter to either allow competing social media platforms to integrate their identical services seamlessly, or break these companies up.
If you send a Gab, Twitter should be forced to allow their users to elect to see it as part of their social platform. For Twitter to exclude it would seem an unfair competitive practice, by the standards of the alt-right, which now occupies the Presidency.
Similarly a user of a competitor to facebook should be allowed to integrate their users’ profile’s features with facebook’s profile’s features, and integrate services seamlessly. Banning specific websites should be an unfair competitive practice as well, especially if any users want them.
If you have a social media account on one platform, it should have to be compatible with other social media accounts. Maybe you break up facebook into ten competing companies whose accounts are compatible with each other and easily trasnfered from service to service, or you force them to allow other companies to integrate their services and allow seamless migration of accounts between them. Same for Twitter.
Donald has already shown a familiarity with this tactic:
In May, after learning of the large team of Washington Post reporters looking into his past, Trump told conservative TV commentator Sean Hannity that Bezos was using the paper to damage Trump’s chances because he feared what a President Trump would mean for Amazon.
“He thinks I’ll go after him for antitrust,” Trump said at the time. “Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing.
“He’s using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust.”
Trump’s campaign later reiterated this narrative in a statement claiming that the Post was being used as political leverage so Amazon doesn’t “get sued for monopolistic tendencies that have led to the destruction of department stores and the retail industry.”
If Twitter won’t free Milo voluntarily, I think we need to bring in big Daddy and let him have a shot at it.
It is nice to have a friend in the highest office in the land. I will be shocked if they don’t come up with something like this, and make a move before the next election.
Go Donald.
You might send a Tweet and a Gab about these reviews of r/K because Big Daddy is a K-strategist
[…] Leftist Pushback – Twitter Purges and Facebook/Google Newsfiltering […]
My first thought, on reading about Google and Facebook blocking “fake news” is that it would turn out all conservative news sites, and ONLY conservative news sites, qualify as “fake news” in their eyes.
And now we have their first list of such companies, and sure enough, I’ve been to all of them and found them useful sources of real information. They don’t ALWAYS get the story correct at first, but then what news source does?
This is as bad, in its own way, as the IRS blocking tax exemptions ONLY for Tea Party and similar conservative groups.
Drain the swamp!
Very simple solution.
Demand the unethical practices cease.
If they don’t.
Then nullify all patent, copyright, and trademark protections the government provides the company.
Getting rid of all the nepotistic anti-competition laws aren’t a part of this consideration, as they should go anyways.