Severe Repression from Leftist Social Media

Some of our readers may be big fans of Alex Jones & Co.

While I am not among that number, it is very concerning that the shallow leftist owners of social media have the power to shut him down. Totally silence him.

What Orwell couldn’t see back when he wrote 1984, was that it wasn’t/isn’t merely the spectre of Big Government we have to fear (though the UK is on the ropes). Our more immediate problems are the Croesus-rich, those intelligent but deeply ill-educated sophists in Silicon Valley who own the social platforms to which so many people seem to have become addicted, including young children.

It ought to be of great concern to our policy-makers, those people who so successfully reined in the last technological improvements in the mid-20th century. Such a curbing would require great political wisdom and I’m not sure we have a deep bench in Washington.

37 thoughts on “Severe Repression from Leftist Social Media

  1. I thought that one of the first things President Trump would do would be the breaking up of the large media companies in the USA, including the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, but especially the TV stations and newspapers.

    I think failing to do so is a big mistake and wonder why he hasn’t done so.

  2. Time to see Orwell revisited! His 1984 was a dystopia ” in retrospect” , reflecting policies of the past. Anthony Burgess ( A Clockwork Orange)gave him a decent spanking in his ” 1985″. Longtime before, H.G.Wells had designed the Eloy in The Time Machine, who are very close to many present day humans. Or Edward Bellamy ‘ s Looking Backwards who predicts the pefectionism of a totally consumerist society. And last but certainly not least, the great Jules Vernes’ Paris In The Year 1960, where people who read ( and know, n.o.e.)have to meet in clandestine circles, though they do travel in magnetic powered transport and use computers for financial operations. Those are real dystopias IMHO.

  3. Those big tech companies have now shown their true colors.
    If they can gang up to silence AJ it’s only a matter of time before they gang up even more and unleash “Skynet” upon us and silence you, me and everyone of us.
    Now is the time to sever all ties with tech monsters like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al.
    Dump em.
    There are plenty of alternatives.

    • Have you done that? “Dumped ’em”, I mean. The only one we use – and that, only sporadically – is Twitter. I used to post our fund-raiser on Twitter but don’t bother anymore, except to use it for direct messaging.

      We also don’t have a smartphone, or any need for a GPS system (there is some kind of homing device in the B’s brain). I do use Kindle, and we obviously have this internet connection via our landline phone. That’s as “plugged in” as we plan to get.

      • I don’t use none of them.
        I use duck duck for browser
        yahoo for mail
        no twitter – stupid tool
        no facebook for the last 4 years or so.
        and never have I payed for cable TV
        I stream what I want and recently like 6 months ago I quit netflix as well
        We don’t need none of this.

        • An eclectic mix you’ve assembled. You’re right: we don’t need any of the above. Since the future is impossible to know, we’ll just take each day as it comes AND choose the most entertaining scenario. I started avoiding “news” when it became red in tooth and claw. Even now I continue to look for good news.

        • I also signed up to gab.ai which my son recommended as the alternative to twitter.

      • I don’t do Facebook, nor Twitter, nor Instagram — but I’m an habitué of YouTube — too many live webcams of Osprey nests make of me a chronic user; plus, I watch Dr. Steve Turley and Scott Adams, daily. Not to forget the dozens, if not hundreds of pre-1960’s films I’ve enjoyed watching on YT.

        So, I’m following closely this latest iteration of leftist lunacy, so sadly predictable; not that I’m worried nor alarmed about the potential damage they intend to inflict using their power to silence us. No. Not at all. I just want to be paying close attention for when they get their collective corporate butts kicked where it really hurts. Capiche?

  4. Twitter / Facebook have implemented sophisticated algorithms, that silence people and comments, letting people being silenced unaware of it. With old time blogsphere and RSS feed, you could choose what you wanted to follow; while with facebook and twitter, they let you think you are choosing your sources of information, but then they give higher priority to who they want. The only solution I see is looking for alternatives to these social networks, there are many others like Minds, Sola, Diaspora, Mastodon, etc.

  5. Once again we can see why sites such as this one are so important. While I consider Alex to be the “National Enquirer” of alternative news, a lot of the issues that he brings up have foundations in actual issues, it’s just the conclusions he comes to that seem a bit far fetched. I can accept or reject what he says based on my own observations. The left never had much of an issue with him as long as he was talking about reptilian overlords, but when he started attacking their PC culture, then he got their attention. Here is my favorite InfoWars commentator, Paul Joseph Watson on the topic

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm4Pks_1_hI

  6. I don’t agree with everything Jones stands for either, but he has the right to say it. The fact that these corporations are self sensoring conservative speech and not left wing speech is a problem for me. So I have gotten jones’ app. YouTube, Apple and google ar not going to tell me who to listen to and what to read.

  7. So the Silicon Valley overlords are now intent upon everyone becoming Twitter-pated, Google-eyed, or a Face-in-the-Book that no one will ever read. Cute.

    I would be concerned about the development of algorithms that could introduce sub-conscious value judgment as directed so that these social media users become members of a digital hive that controls their thoughts and emotions to the extent of enslaving them as profit producers for these companies as well as guardians of the companies’ interests.

    I think that we are seeing the initial forays into this realm of manipulative control with the rise of the various Anti-Fascist (auntie Fa) groups, like the ones in Burka-ley, California.

    • But there is pushback. It’s a very big country and not everyone, not even most, are caught in the net. The problem is who makes the rules and who enforces them. The problem will eventually reach a crisis point and then it remains to be seen what prevails eventually. Algorithms that affect value judgments have to get access to those values…it’s still an open game. If it weren’t we’d be saying “Madam President”.

      • Instead of Madame Hillary, Yes, let’s hear it for the pushback. Now what was that high school football cheer? Push ’em back way back!

  8. I would like to ask a favour of copywriter and robyt. (The former wrote that there are plenty of alternatives to Facebook / YouTube, etc. The latter offered some examples.)

    Would either (or both) of you consider writing a longer piece for GofV with recommendations? I suspect the Baron would go along with the idea.

    I have begun exploring options to escape the growing stranglehold of the monopolists, but I’m only in the early phases. Please help me avoid reinventing the wheel. You probably already know where folks can find the best alternatives.

    Whether The Donald can declare these corporate critters to be public utilities, and monopolists in restraint of trade (free speech), and break them up, as was done with the telephone company, is doubtful. When the trillion dollar corp Apple led the way for the others in taking down Alex Jones, and collectively these clowns are probably the biggest lobbyists in Washington, I don’t see much chance of that.

    If ALL the conservative patrons of the current monopolists jump ship to alternative platforms … it will only serve, unfortunately, to polarize even further already divided nations, but at some point self-preservation must come first. (We will still face the issue of where ultimate power over the internet itself resides). [Perhaps here might be an alternative application of block-chain technology?]

    And does anyone else consider this to be “interfering in our elections,” (by domestic foes of the Constitution), a matter of weeks before the mid-terms? Doesn’t this qualify as “trying to disrupt our democracy”?

    In the short term, I suggest folks support the efforts of the Media Research Center (and its allied organizations) to arrange meetings with the monopolists, to DEMAND equal footing with the Southern Poverty Law Center, as advisors to the monopolists on the definition of, and monitoring of, ‘hate speech,’ and the revision of their presently indecipherable ‘community standards’. [ See link below : ]

    https://info.mrc.org/StopCensoringConservatives

    • I can write more on this, then if Baron wants he can put it on a new post, for alternatives.

      There are so many things to say on this subject, that I do not know where to start from. Thanks to God(s) we do not live in the 1984 Orwell novel, where everything was controlled by the government. The choice of which communication technology to use is still on our side.

      But we must ensure to understand what the technology is for and what best alternatives we can count on. I am not a big user of social networks, I always preferred to track my own blog/site of interest, with PULL request like (against that of PUSH which is the basement of social network technology). I also in the past (it was 10 or 20 years ago) remeber to have used a lot Irc and the Usenet Network (you can find today in a good history book if you care). With RSS feeed it was possible to access information with only one simple rule, all your friends/peers/gurus/blogs were sending you the last 10 or 12 entries from their blogroll in order of time.

      Everything changed with social network like Facebook and Twitter, where you still choose who to follow, but you have access information with PUSH technology. These social networks have algorithms, that choose the information from your list of friends, and then filter and send to you. They apply Artificial Intelligence algorithms, so for example, if you click 10 times on the posts from a source you like more, facebook will give that particular friend, a higher ranking above all the others friends, and use this rank to prioritize the news delivered to you. But they can also alter the information delivered to you, just arbitrarly giving lower ranking to the friends and groups they dislike (like they did with many people I was following on facebook before leaving it forever this year). With this mechanism in place, they can do what they want, they FILTER the information to you, because they are behind the PUSH algorithms that feed your news.

      (in the past censorship was made by the Internet Service Providers and connection/bandwidth vendors, for example forum site like Stormfront, was blocked this way and it is unreachable from many western countries; they also blocked sites for mp3, videos and other copyrighted materials, downloading, like piratebay. This kind of censorship should all be in history books, because today it is already obsolete.)

      So lets go to the alternatives for social networks:

      -1) lastly I have heard a lot of blockchain concept, but in my opinion it is nothing new, just decentralized serverless and replicating infrastracture.

      0) Never use PUSH technology: just fill your blog list of favourites/bookmarks, or access them with RSS news feed reader. Nobody can filter the contents delivered to you!

      1) https://www.minds.com/ – it is the most like facebook, but you will not find many on there. This is the only one I tryed and for me it is still interesting.
      2) https://steemit.com/
      3) https://sola.ai
      4) https://mastodon.social/
      5) …

      Another concept which is a lot in the talk today is the cryptocurrency social network (like minds and steemit): instead of earning +1 every time someone upvote one of your comment, you get a “real” virtual money. (But I do not believe cryptocurrency is worth commenting).

  9. [Copulation Mentation] is being sued by the families of murdered children who he claimed that their Deaths were faked or didn’t exist. Which would have been unpleasant but his supporters thought it was reasonable to go to the town and insult grieving parents. That’s beyond the pale.

    Free speech means the government can’t lock you up, doesn’t mean people have to listen or stock your books. Alex Jones discovered he’s a rather repellant fish in a very big sea. If advertisers want nothing to do with your brand, you’re kind of [out of luck].

    • I don’t understand your comment. Alex Jones has a large audience and they are at a loss as to how to buy what he is willing to sell. They had no say in his being silenced.

      The Left doesn’t believe in the marketplace of ideas

  10. Black Pigeon Speaks addresses this well today(16:46 7 Aug). It is on you tube video titled: “Gay Frogs, Censorship and the Ballad of InfoWars”. Apple, Google and the whole lot of them were heavily supported by federal, state and local govts and were given much of their tech by the taxpayer. Black Pigeon addresses the rest of it far better than I will and deserves the views.

    There is no reason why public access to ideas should be regulated by those who are supplicants for public assistance. Rich supplicants are NOT better than poor ones.

    And anyone who has the knowhow can enter a direct link less clumsy than the one I have offered.

  11. Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah………………………………….

    I don’t think so.

    I think a few handcuffs, blindfolds, orange jump suits, and a quick but noisy trip to Gitmo in a C130 transport.
    THEN you can start to “negotiate” freedom of the electrons.
    Just a tad FED UP, I am.

  12. Infowars is Not Just Being Censored, Basic Business Infrastructure Now Being Stripped as MailChimp Bans Their Email
    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/08/infowars-is-not-just-being-censored-basic-business-infrastructure-now-being-stripped-as-mailchimp-bans-their-email/

    **********

    Your banking data was once off-limits to tech companies. Now they’re racing to get it.
    https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1026905071047634944
    Facebook says banks and credit-card companies have shown interest in partnerships that would boost the sharing of users’

  13. The opening paragraph supposes that many of the readers are fans of Alex Jones. Well, I’ll suppose many are fans of Ann Coulter. And I’ll propose that her commentary is as equally incendiary as Alex Jones to those same virginal eyes and ears that have “banned” Alex Jones. I’m a consistent follower of Ann Coulter, her punches are solar plexus powerful whereas Jones mostly are jabbing with the occasional blowtorch when he is “off his meds”.

    That a bunch of “private corporations” conspired to take down Jones is obvious, only the extremely naive see this as good housekeeping of the social media cyberspace. If the public tolerates this they will go after Coulter and a host of other low hanging fruit and higher up ones because they despise the 1st Amendment and the 2nd one too.

  14. Will anyone here seriously miss his commentary. I lean right but can clearly tell he is [less than reliably factual].

    • Not going to challenge that statement.
      But are you seriously going to set your standard for ‘worth listening to’ by what is “reliably factual”?

      Perhaps you’ve noticed that the major networks are maybe, at best, only 60% reliably factual?

      But if you’ve cut them off, then you have grounds, as they say, for your stance. Otherwise, not so much.

      • Well, he didn’t actually say “reliably factual”; it was a more vulgar idiom. But I glossed its meaning with that phrase.

        • Ah hahhh!

          Thank you for the clarification. But still, you might agree, that the MSM boys and girls of the MSM are far less truthful than they purport to be.

          🙂

    • Chuck, I have never viewed anything that Alex Jones has put out on any platform. I despise the techies for trying to make it impossible for me to do so.

  15. I for one am not a fan of Alex Jones but it is the principle of “hang together or hang seperately”. If there is no pushback from collectively taking down a well known rabble-rouser then it becomes that much easier to silence others who are not nearly as well known or controversial.

  16. The Progs already deplatformed or at least has tried desperately to take down the Alt-Right and nationalist sources. The Alt-Lite and mainstream “normie” conservatives stood by silently. Now emboldened the Progs are moving on to taking down the Alt-Lite. When is the Right finally going to stand up to the thuggism that is the Left? We are at the fork in the road.

  17. I’d like to remind folks here that our friend Matt Bracken has often been on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, and even – if I’m not mistaken – guest hosted (or at least had an hour segment to himself).

    Like the Baron, I can’t say I’m a fan of Jones. Too often he seems over the top, but I want the right to decide for myself. I’d also like to be able to tune in to him when he has guests I think are more level-headed than Jones himself.

    And lastly, the increasingly obvious extremism and bias in the LameStreamMedia drove me to any and all alternatives. THEY created, years ago, a ready-made audience for Rush Limbaugh, in talk-radio, and failed to shut him down (laughably bleating for ‘equal time’). We now have as a ridiculous senator the failed comedian-bozo the Left set up as a rival talk-radio host, Al Franken. No wonder Jones has the audience he does.

    • The reason why I don’t bad-mouth Alex Jones is that InfoWars was the ONLY outlet that did real reporting during the standoff at the Bundy Ranch in (I think) May 2014. InfoWars had a reporter & cameraman there on the ground, under the overpass, when none of the MSM outlets did, not even Fox or Breitbart. They provided live coverage of what was happening.

      Alex Jones deserves a lot of credit for that, regardless of how wacko or money-grubbing he is.

  18. All of that proverbial “blood and treasure” that dot Arlington Cemetery in Northern Virginia must grieve tremulously at the casualness of the American conversation that demands a citizens voice be silenced because he is considered a buffoon. Maybe even a liar or incontinent in the niceties of pleasant conversation.

    Many of the martial men and women buried there were possibly illiterate or inarticulate but no doubt had the boisterousness of Alex Jones that made them “American”. I like Jones I like American Boisterousness. I capitalize it I like it so much. I like it because it reflects freedom of speech and thought. The technical class imagines algorithms to denude American Boisterousness. They desire so much to “manage,” every citizen they salivate at the idea Americans can be “managed”. If you are unable to discern what is occurring you’re an American Fool.

  19. Nice to see people boast about not using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the like. But are you using a Virtual Private Network (VPN)? Carry any type of wireless cellphone? Drive a vehicle with wireless inputs? You do realize too that the whole internet is capable of tracking and recording everything you do or write on it? Don’t you know that? Because I’ve known that since 1998 when I first logged onto it.

    • I agree.

      That’s why we don’t use a smartphone.

      I don’t use Google or Facebook.

      Have maintained Twitter for using its message service. Actually, I tried to get back in the stream, but it seems a waste of time so couldn’t find the energy to keep it up.

      By “driving a vehicle with wireless inputs”, do you mean using GPS to find your way around? The B has an uncanny sense of direction, so no, we don’t need one. And our car is too old to have any built-in gadgets.

      We do have a landline phone and wireless connection through our phone service; it’s the only thing available in many rural areas.

      But our spending habits – groceries, petrol, and monthly bills – are all on our credit card so they are still tracking us to some degree.

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