I used to work at YouTube, and it was quite clear to me after I'd been there a while that the people in charge were basically dumbasses. Very rich dumbasses, but still dumbasses. They are incapable of thinking through possible scenarios in which it might be legitimate to display weapons, violence, or bigotry in a video, or at least, they prefer not to think about such things because there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.
To anyone with half a brain, a video containing part of a racist rant by a Nazi waving a gun is only a good or bad depending on context. Is the video promoting this guy, or is it letting him hang himself with his own words? Or is it just saying, "This is what happened in this place, at this time"? These distinctions matter!
America is moving in the direction of a police state and it only works because big tech is in bed with the DemocratIc party and the establishment wing of the Republican party. Is this really about the 2nd amendment? Not even close - gun ownership is a right. Is it about Trump's speech or the pro-gun protests which a 5th grader can tell you did not incite violence? Nope. Big tech's censorship and control is simply about shutting down half of the country's free speech and opinions to strengthen and expand the liberal belief that people with values and ideology that are different from theirs do not deserve to be heard. They will continue to play this hand until someone steps up and fights back. Whether you liked Trump or hated Trump, he wasn't afraid to stand up to this nonsense.
In today’s world, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry would be kicked off of Twitter and FB and deplatformed by Amazon. Censorship is allowed by a cowardly populace that clings to the status quo, no matter how repressive it is.
While not an easy migration, I'm moving away from Google, YouTube and Facebook. I've enjoyed their services immensely over the years but I just can't tolerate censorship from corporations in this manor. I have no issue if an Independent Content Creator uploads a video committing a crime or encouraging others to do so but none of these stories are of Creators violating the law. It seems the common thread is those Independent Content Creators and other users of Big Tech are more and more, people like me. I question the Narrative, I don't believe Corporate Media or Government without a healthy does of skepticism. I don't consume Corporate Media at all, that's one reason I'm here right now. I only consume Independent Journalism and Content Creators.
It seems evident to me that the Duopoly of political parties, NeoCon/NeoLibs, working with Corporations are doing an end run around the 1st amendment citing "private property" as their cheap veneer.
Close out your Facebook, move to Gab. Close out Twitter move to .....too late (another victim of the vertical monopoly). Move away from YouTube for Odysee, Bitchute, Rumble. Close out your gmail/hotmail/outlook/yahoo email accounts for protonmail or Tutanota.
They're crude by comparison but they're not in the Elite Corporate/Government/Narrative club.
Big Tech and their cabal have power because we give it to them.
Reading Matt's column and Glenn Greenwald's I get so depressed, between the left wanting more censorship and the right not willing to do anything are we doomed? Seriously it feels like there is no bottom and both the democrats and republicans could care less.
Have you ever watched NFL football? The commercials, I mean. Ad after ad for cops shows and military dramas (think SEAL Team) showcase guns. Firearms. Not only guns, but men and women pointing them in the general direction of other people. All these "gun" ads for violent shows that our kids see are accepted as "normal," yet a few firearms at a rally violate YouTube's policy?
If we wanted to enforce a firearm/violence policy on American TV, half the shows would go off the air.
These are not "pro-gun" protests. They are "civil rights" and "pro-Constitution" protests.
1/6 was not a "riot" or "insurrection". It was a "mostly peaceful protest". No person has been charged with "insurrection" which begs the question of how Trump can be impeached for inciting insurrection.
It was not "Twitter" that expected follow on violent protests on 1/17. It was FBI agents gaslighting on Twitter hoping to cause violent protests on 1/17.
Progressives are getting caught up in their own creation of cancel culture and technocratic tyranny. Cry me a river. For example, "I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous. But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a death sentence for outlets like ours." JC's cognitive dissonance is blinding.
"Hate Speech" is not a thing in the USA....yet.
"In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality." - "Offense" is subjective. For example, I am not the least bit offended by any person's words because I am not mentally weak.
Language matters Matt. Please be precise and stop using the nomenclature of the enemies of our country(The Misleadia's Newspeak Minders).
I like how Google's motto for years was "don't be evil." To me, that's the equivalent of going on a date, and they first thing they say is "I'm not a serial killer"
There is zero chance of gaining any regulatory relief from the federal government under the current administration. If Republicans are smart - an "if" large enough to hide a couple galactic clusters inside - they look at their recent House wins, and start running NOW on a free speech platform for 2022.
Yes, private businesses can limits what is posted to their servers.
But the attempts to shut down alternative services are grotesque violations of anti-trust, and need to be treated as such. The coordinated efforts to not only kick Parler off Amazon servers, but to pressure their attorneys, their domain hosts, even their flippin' accountants, into dropping them as clients, are or ought to be illegal.
It's already illegal under civil law to conspire to deny others the opportunity to earn a living through campaigns of harassment. It's time to start going after these clowns.
Great interview! This is kind of related to the interview Jimmy Dore had with a member of the Boogaloo Boys. It was a really good interview and surprising. It turns out the Boogaloo are not white supremacist racists. At all. There’s so much the msm is either willfully keeping from us in order to keep the sides divided or they just live in a bubble and are not aware of the common interests of so many of these groups.
Without these independent media outlets we would be kept in the dark about so much. This summer Michael Tracey went to Minneapolis and filmed interviews with locals, reported on people who had their businesses looted, burned and very damaged due to the riots. It is so incredible how derelict our media is in reporting any kind of truth. They have a narrative and they will NOT deviate from it whatsoever. It is so shameful and disgusting.
I support and will continue to support as much independent media as I can afford to. I’m so sick of being only able to choose from the red or blue team. I just want the straight, unvarnished truth no matter what. Follow the facts wherever they lead. Ideology kills, literally.
I've never liked that "incitement" is not protected by the First Amendment, and I've been extremely dismayed lately by how its lack of protection is almost universally accepted, by liberals especially, though this dreadfulness is understandable because the illegality of incitement has been validated by the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. Nonetheless, think about what outlawing incitement means. Does it not invoke, and answer in the affirmative on everyone's behalf, the sententious question asked of children, "If someone told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
Banning incitement is infantilizing and dehumanizing. With this concept, we've made an unseemly, morally obtuse concession to the trope of the Mob, a long-standing, anti-democratic slander in political theory that goes back to Plato and neutralizes the responsibility of those who listen to an inciter to restrain themselves (assuming they are moved), and not commit crimes afterwards. Proof: the disavowal of responsibility by some of those who stormed the Capitol on the ground that Trump incited them. In essence, these idiots are saying, and asking the rest of us to accept, that they were lemmings and should be treated as such. This is not morally valid in a would-be free, democratic society.
But if you don't buy that, I am here to inform you that, as we speak, the concept of incitement is being negligently and willfully stretched to encompass "incitements" beyond the current legal standard that supposedly circumscribes its unwarranted extension, and that doing this has been a project of the political establishment and its officious intellectuals, e.g. Cass Sunstein, for a long time. Glenn Greenwald just did a very fine run down of how this expansion is unfolding, and the threat to freedom of speech it poses is obvious. Therefore, watch out: if you encourage this development, then all the limits on the concept's current misapplication to less than indisputable incitements to "imminent lawless action", as the dubious saying goes, will fall away, leaving any government stooge or tech monopoly free to claim that it also applies to unauthorized thoughts and speech where the threat of violence is unquestionably non-existent.
10. Suspend rule of law - Free speech, Patriot Act, Shooting at Protesters (check)
*** Cannot say we were not warned. Hedges talked about sacrifice zones. Dr. West talked about the neo-fascist and neoliberal elements of the elite clashing and consolidating. Thomas Frank reminds us that the corporate left and moderate right have merged with the intelligence community, big media and tech companies to form the merger between state, business, and military - very definition of fascism.
Tell tale sign is to look out across our country and look at all the indifference from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths, as capital seeks business as usual and the wealthy are seeking normalcy. People who are struggling want healthcare, non-penury education, and affordable housing, but this would eat into the profit streams of people who are in moral bankruptcy -- so they choose to forget. This is how you can tell we are fucked as a nation. Every person for themselves (YOYO - you're on your own) just does not work. It is a fable, a story tale from an exploitative business class pissed off that Roosevelt beat them for so long --- not taking inventory and shoving Taibbi's vampire squid up our asses, ridiculing even the most minor attempts at socialist policies to help people survive because ....
wait for it
wait for it
It's "commy-u-nest" - when any first year course in economics could explain that all to most economies across the world find a way to balance capital and labor needs.
Alas, this kind of thinking is what will be the death of us and our country - Agnotology 101
#1, Big Tech is a misnomer. This is Big Low Tech of user generated content webpages, cookies and advertising sales. It is certainly not an essential tech. Remove their liability protection on one hand and strengthen the ability to sue by users, force them to produce reporting to individual users on what data they collected and what they sold it for and their business models will collapse and new players will emerge. Google today is almost useless as a basic info research tool. Pages and pages of ads followed by product marketing masquerading as info and reviews. Force them to make a pure info search options available. Force twitter to cough up identities of cancel mobs participants and give users the ability to sue them.
A Blue Checkmark fighting dozens of lawsuits in number of states will think twice before advocating cancelling anyone. There is nothing more dangerous to 1st amendment and our freedom to think and debate than the current social media monopolies. Apple and Google on the other hand should be divested of of the app stores so alternatives to these monopolies can appear and grow. Amazon can easily be told that discrimination against any American because of their political views will automatically disqualify them from bidding on any government contracts be there for cloud services or toilet paper. All of the above can be done within the boundaries of the Constitution.
The social media outlets for news are like public utilities. They are similar to a phone line. Or even a book. We don't shut down people's phones because they may be saying something we don't like. Society did try book banning and book burning, but the need for dialogue is too strong to be suppressed forever. If the oligarchs control our access to ideas, it's all over. This is a huge threat to my right to choose where I get my ideas and which sources I trust in the end.
Not long ago Congress published a major 450 page report on -- Silicon Valley tech. giants monopolies. It was expected that major action will be on breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google into well defined pieces.
This appears not likely since Democrat oligarchs and their WS and arms/intelligence industry donors are grateful for silencing Democrat party and Biden-family corruption (Hunter's laptops, etc.) facts and now -- massive silencing of independent news stories.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are completely integrated into surveillance apparatus -- they are playing a key role in limiting remnants of free speech in the US -- a fascism packaged as "fight against fascism". A more polite term used for fascism in the US is -- authoritarianism...
Only a 3rd, 4th, etc. viable parties will reduce the two-party monopoly of one party with two wings - wings formed to polarize population into "red" and "blue" factions.
Also remember -- DSA "party" is part of Democrat party formed solely to harness and corrupt "progressives" ala TYT, The Intercept, select members of Congress/Senate. DNC cabal of oligarchs are afraid of progressives -- they closely collaborate with GOP on their common interests.
I used to work at YouTube, and it was quite clear to me after I'd been there a while that the people in charge were basically dumbasses. Very rich dumbasses, but still dumbasses. They are incapable of thinking through possible scenarios in which it might be legitimate to display weapons, violence, or bigotry in a video, or at least, they prefer not to think about such things because there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.
To anyone with half a brain, a video containing part of a racist rant by a Nazi waving a gun is only a good or bad depending on context. Is the video promoting this guy, or is it letting him hang himself with his own words? Or is it just saying, "This is what happened in this place, at this time"? These distinctions matter!
America is moving in the direction of a police state and it only works because big tech is in bed with the DemocratIc party and the establishment wing of the Republican party. Is this really about the 2nd amendment? Not even close - gun ownership is a right. Is it about Trump's speech or the pro-gun protests which a 5th grader can tell you did not incite violence? Nope. Big tech's censorship and control is simply about shutting down half of the country's free speech and opinions to strengthen and expand the liberal belief that people with values and ideology that are different from theirs do not deserve to be heard. They will continue to play this hand until someone steps up and fights back. Whether you liked Trump or hated Trump, he wasn't afraid to stand up to this nonsense.
In today’s world, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry would be kicked off of Twitter and FB and deplatformed by Amazon. Censorship is allowed by a cowardly populace that clings to the status quo, no matter how repressive it is.
While not an easy migration, I'm moving away from Google, YouTube and Facebook. I've enjoyed their services immensely over the years but I just can't tolerate censorship from corporations in this manor. I have no issue if an Independent Content Creator uploads a video committing a crime or encouraging others to do so but none of these stories are of Creators violating the law. It seems the common thread is those Independent Content Creators and other users of Big Tech are more and more, people like me. I question the Narrative, I don't believe Corporate Media or Government without a healthy does of skepticism. I don't consume Corporate Media at all, that's one reason I'm here right now. I only consume Independent Journalism and Content Creators.
It seems evident to me that the Duopoly of political parties, NeoCon/NeoLibs, working with Corporations are doing an end run around the 1st amendment citing "private property" as their cheap veneer.
Close out your Facebook, move to Gab. Close out Twitter move to .....too late (another victim of the vertical monopoly). Move away from YouTube for Odysee, Bitchute, Rumble. Close out your gmail/hotmail/outlook/yahoo email accounts for protonmail or Tutanota.
They're crude by comparison but they're not in the Elite Corporate/Government/Narrative club.
Big Tech and their cabal have power because we give it to them.
Reading Matt's column and Glenn Greenwald's I get so depressed, between the left wanting more censorship and the right not willing to do anything are we doomed? Seriously it feels like there is no bottom and both the democrats and republicans could care less.
Have you ever watched NFL football? The commercials, I mean. Ad after ad for cops shows and military dramas (think SEAL Team) showcase guns. Firearms. Not only guns, but men and women pointing them in the general direction of other people. All these "gun" ads for violent shows that our kids see are accepted as "normal," yet a few firearms at a rally violate YouTube's policy?
If we wanted to enforce a firearm/violence policy on American TV, half the shows would go off the air.
Some clarifications for Matt:
These are not "pro-gun" protests. They are "civil rights" and "pro-Constitution" protests.
1/6 was not a "riot" or "insurrection". It was a "mostly peaceful protest". No person has been charged with "insurrection" which begs the question of how Trump can be impeached for inciting insurrection.
It was not "Twitter" that expected follow on violent protests on 1/17. It was FBI agents gaslighting on Twitter hoping to cause violent protests on 1/17.
Progressives are getting caught up in their own creation of cancel culture and technocratic tyranny. Cry me a river. For example, "I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous. But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a death sentence for outlets like ours." JC's cognitive dissonance is blinding.
"Hate Speech" is not a thing in the USA....yet.
"In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality." - "Offense" is subjective. For example, I am not the least bit offended by any person's words because I am not mentally weak.
Language matters Matt. Please be precise and stop using the nomenclature of the enemies of our country(The Misleadia's Newspeak Minders).
I like how Google's motto for years was "don't be evil." To me, that's the equivalent of going on a date, and they first thing they say is "I'm not a serial killer"
There is zero chance of gaining any regulatory relief from the federal government under the current administration. If Republicans are smart - an "if" large enough to hide a couple galactic clusters inside - they look at their recent House wins, and start running NOW on a free speech platform for 2022.
Yes, private businesses can limits what is posted to their servers.
But the attempts to shut down alternative services are grotesque violations of anti-trust, and need to be treated as such. The coordinated efforts to not only kick Parler off Amazon servers, but to pressure their attorneys, their domain hosts, even their flippin' accountants, into dropping them as clients, are or ought to be illegal.
It's already illegal under civil law to conspire to deny others the opportunity to earn a living through campaigns of harassment. It's time to start going after these clowns.
Great interview! This is kind of related to the interview Jimmy Dore had with a member of the Boogaloo Boys. It was a really good interview and surprising. It turns out the Boogaloo are not white supremacist racists. At all. There’s so much the msm is either willfully keeping from us in order to keep the sides divided or they just live in a bubble and are not aware of the common interests of so many of these groups.
Without these independent media outlets we would be kept in the dark about so much. This summer Michael Tracey went to Minneapolis and filmed interviews with locals, reported on people who had their businesses looted, burned and very damaged due to the riots. It is so incredible how derelict our media is in reporting any kind of truth. They have a narrative and they will NOT deviate from it whatsoever. It is so shameful and disgusting.
I support and will continue to support as much independent media as I can afford to. I’m so sick of being only able to choose from the red or blue team. I just want the straight, unvarnished truth no matter what. Follow the facts wherever they lead. Ideology kills, literally.
I've never liked that "incitement" is not protected by the First Amendment, and I've been extremely dismayed lately by how its lack of protection is almost universally accepted, by liberals especially, though this dreadfulness is understandable because the illegality of incitement has been validated by the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. Nonetheless, think about what outlawing incitement means. Does it not invoke, and answer in the affirmative on everyone's behalf, the sententious question asked of children, "If someone told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
Banning incitement is infantilizing and dehumanizing. With this concept, we've made an unseemly, morally obtuse concession to the trope of the Mob, a long-standing, anti-democratic slander in political theory that goes back to Plato and neutralizes the responsibility of those who listen to an inciter to restrain themselves (assuming they are moved), and not commit crimes afterwards. Proof: the disavowal of responsibility by some of those who stormed the Capitol on the ground that Trump incited them. In essence, these idiots are saying, and asking the rest of us to accept, that they were lemmings and should be treated as such. This is not morally valid in a would-be free, democratic society.
But if you don't buy that, I am here to inform you that, as we speak, the concept of incitement is being negligently and willfully stretched to encompass "incitements" beyond the current legal standard that supposedly circumscribes its unwarranted extension, and that doing this has been a project of the political establishment and its officious intellectuals, e.g. Cass Sunstein, for a long time. Glenn Greenwald just did a very fine run down of how this expansion is unfolding, and the threat to freedom of speech it poses is obvious. Therefore, watch out: if you encourage this development, then all the limits on the concept's current misapplication to less than indisputable incitements to "imminent lawless action", as the dubious saying goes, will fall away, leaving any government stooge or tech monopoly free to claim that it also applies to unauthorized thoughts and speech where the threat of violence is unquestionably non-existent.
Naomi Wolf's 10 steps to Fascism - 2007
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy (check)
2. Create a gulag - domestic prison pipeline and Guantanamo/Black sites overseas (check)
3. Develop a thug caste - police, proud boys, gunmen in the state capitol buildings (check)
4. Set up a surveillance system - See NSA's Bluffdale in Utah's Wasatch Range (check)
5. Harass citizen groups - Protests like Black Lives Matter, Occupy WS, XL Pipeline (check)
6. Arbitrary detention and release - racism/classism in America for forever (check)
7. Target key individuals - "Glenn Greenwald, just got blamed for Lauren Wolf firing (check)
8. Control the Press - CNN, MsNBC, Fox (Two party duopoly fairway of topics (check)
9. Dissent = Treason - Intelligence community operations Russiagate; Assange (check)
10. Suspend rule of law - Free speech, Patriot Act, Shooting at Protesters (check)
*** Cannot say we were not warned. Hedges talked about sacrifice zones. Dr. West talked about the neo-fascist and neoliberal elements of the elite clashing and consolidating. Thomas Frank reminds us that the corporate left and moderate right have merged with the intelligence community, big media and tech companies to form the merger between state, business, and military - very definition of fascism.
Tell tale sign is to look out across our country and look at all the indifference from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths, as capital seeks business as usual and the wealthy are seeking normalcy. People who are struggling want healthcare, non-penury education, and affordable housing, but this would eat into the profit streams of people who are in moral bankruptcy -- so they choose to forget. This is how you can tell we are fucked as a nation. Every person for themselves (YOYO - you're on your own) just does not work. It is a fable, a story tale from an exploitative business class pissed off that Roosevelt beat them for so long --- not taking inventory and shoving Taibbi's vampire squid up our asses, ridiculing even the most minor attempts at socialist policies to help people survive because ....
wait for it
wait for it
It's "commy-u-nest" - when any first year course in economics could explain that all to most economies across the world find a way to balance capital and labor needs.
Alas, this kind of thinking is what will be the death of us and our country - Agnotology 101
#1, Big Tech is a misnomer. This is Big Low Tech of user generated content webpages, cookies and advertising sales. It is certainly not an essential tech. Remove their liability protection on one hand and strengthen the ability to sue by users, force them to produce reporting to individual users on what data they collected and what they sold it for and their business models will collapse and new players will emerge. Google today is almost useless as a basic info research tool. Pages and pages of ads followed by product marketing masquerading as info and reviews. Force them to make a pure info search options available. Force twitter to cough up identities of cancel mobs participants and give users the ability to sue them.
A Blue Checkmark fighting dozens of lawsuits in number of states will think twice before advocating cancelling anyone. There is nothing more dangerous to 1st amendment and our freedom to think and debate than the current social media monopolies. Apple and Google on the other hand should be divested of of the app stores so alternatives to these monopolies can appear and grow. Amazon can easily be told that discrimination against any American because of their political views will automatically disqualify them from bidding on any government contracts be there for cloud services or toilet paper. All of the above can be done within the boundaries of the Constitution.
Turns out it's not YouTube, it's ThemTube.
The social media outlets for news are like public utilities. They are similar to a phone line. Or even a book. We don't shut down people's phones because they may be saying something we don't like. Society did try book banning and book burning, but the need for dialogue is too strong to be suppressed forever. If the oligarchs control our access to ideas, it's all over. This is a huge threat to my right to choose where I get my ideas and which sources I trust in the end.
Not long ago Congress published a major 450 page report on -- Silicon Valley tech. giants monopolies. It was expected that major action will be on breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google into well defined pieces.
This appears not likely since Democrat oligarchs and their WS and arms/intelligence industry donors are grateful for silencing Democrat party and Biden-family corruption (Hunter's laptops, etc.) facts and now -- massive silencing of independent news stories.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are completely integrated into surveillance apparatus -- they are playing a key role in limiting remnants of free speech in the US -- a fascism packaged as "fight against fascism". A more polite term used for fascism in the US is -- authoritarianism...
Only a 3rd, 4th, etc. viable parties will reduce the two-party monopoly of one party with two wings - wings formed to polarize population into "red" and "blue" factions.
Also remember -- DSA "party" is part of Democrat party formed solely to harness and corrupt "progressives" ala TYT, The Intercept, select members of Congress/Senate. DNC cabal of oligarchs are afraid of progressives -- they closely collaborate with GOP on their common interests.