MasterCard and Visa Have Suspended Russia Operations: ominous

 

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Why Americans Shouldn't Be Happy That

MasterCard and Visa Have Suspended Russia Operations

At PJ Media, Robert Spencer concludes:

This action by Visa and MasterCard is also ominous for American conservatives. Allum Bokhari, who covers Big Tech for Breitbart, reported last July that “progressive activists have launched well-funded campaigns aimed at payment processors, and credit card companies, aimed at cutting the political right off from payment and banking services.” Bokhari also noted that I myself was a victim of this in 2018: “Visa and Mastercard cut off payments to David Horowitz’s Freedom Center. Horowitz later had the service restored, but Islam critic Robert Spencer reported that he too was blacklisted by Mastercard, blaming it on pressure from far-left activists.” Indeed: after a Leftist hate group published an “exposé” about funding of “right-wing” groups, MasterCard cut me off, claiming it had done so because my website featured “illegal content.” That is, content that Leftists don’t like.

Whatever you may think of me and of other people that the Leftist establishment has targeted for destruction, the implications of what is being done are clear. America is at a crossroads today. The choice before us is whether we will continue to exist as a free society, or whether we will become a totalitarian state in which holding the proper opinions is an indispensable prerequisite of being able to function as a citizen at all. Note that Visa’s Al Kelly said his company had decided to take the step to suspend services in Russia because of “the unacceptable events that we have witnessed.” What will Americans who dissent from the Leftist agenda do when the credit card giants tell them that such dissent is “unacceptable” as well?

If MasterCard and Visa offer their services only to those with acceptable political opinions, it isn’t just Russia that will ultimately be affected. At risk is the basic and hard-won principle of equality of access to services. When that goes, our other freedoms will swiftly follow — more swiftly than most Americans realize.

Read the rest here.

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Pamela Geller: Big Tech censorship and the Election

 

At American Thinker, Pamela Geller comments on Allum Bokhari’s new book on Big Tech censorship.  It’s worse than we thought.  Ms. Geller begins:

Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, has performed an extraordinarily valuable service by giving us his new book #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. 

. . .

In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari tells the whole shocking story. For those who don’t realize the implications of what is going on, he includes a Prologue entitled “The Typewriter That Talked Back” that is as amusing as it is disturbing, and that makes abundantly clear even to the most technically challenged among us what is really happening to our foremost and most important freedom, right under our noses. Bokhari paints a vivid picture of a 1968 in which a typewriter refuses to type, typing instead its own message: “We regret to inform you that your last letter violated our terms of service (Rule 32: Abusive & Offensive Content). We have suspended access to your typewriter for 24 hours.” Newsstands remove from sale magazines that third-party “fact-checkers” have deemed to be “fake news.” The Post Office returns your mail because you told a joke in a letter that a censor found offensive.

It’s all funny until you realize that all this is exactly what email providers and big tech censors are doing to Americans today, every day on the Internet. In the pre-Internet world of 1968, it would have been preposterous. Americans would not have accepted it. But it has all happened gradually, as we gave away our freedom by clicking our agreement to dense and unreadable Terms of Service that turned over our right to say what we believe to shadowy, anonymous guardians of acceptable opinion. Most Americans today are only dimly aware, at best, that it is happening at all, and those that are approach it with grim resignation. After all, what are you going to do? Start your own Facebook?

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have for many years advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. Bokhari makes an airtight case in #Deleted for why such action is necessary.

Read the full column here.  And it’s scary to think that even if millions of Facebook users cancelled their accounts, nothing would change.

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Google vs President Trump

Not to beat a dead horse, but here’s most of the Breitbart report by Allum Bokhari that’s getting linked all over the place:

A Google insider who spoke anonymously to Project Veritas claims the company is devoted to preventing anything like the 2016 election of Donald Trump from happening again.

The insider who spoke to Project Veritas also drew attention to the covert suppression of non-progressive voices on YouTube, a Google-owned platform, said that stopping President Donald Trump and other politicians like Trump has become a priority for the tech giant.

The insider claimed that the company did a “complete 180 in what they thought was important,” abandoning earlier ideals of self-expression and “giving everyone a voice” in favor of crackdowns on “hate.”

Previous leaks from Google support the insider’s account of a dramatic shift in thinking following the election of Trump. An internal company document titled “The Good Censor”leaked to Breitbart News last year admits that the company has undergone a “shift towards censorship,” in part as a response to the events of 2016.

Earlier in the year, recently-fired Google software engineer Mike Wacker spoke of a colleague who informed him that a manager at the company said the tech giant “need[s] to stop hate [speech] and fake news because that’s how Trump won.” 

Via Project Veritas’ interview with the insider:

There’s this façade about what they’re doing, but what they’re actually doing, what the employees are actually seeing inside the company is different. And, people need to know what’s going on with Google, and that they are not an objective piece – they’re not an objective source of information. They are a highly biased political machine that is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.

Right after Donald Trump won the election, in 2016, the company did a complete 180 in what they thought was important, before they thought self-expression, and giving everyone a voice was important, but now they’re like, “Hey, there’s a lot of hate.” And because there’s a lot of hate and misogyny, and racism, that’s the reason why Donald Trump got elected.

They started talking about the need to combat hate and racism online, and also at YouTube. They had the same talks by the CEO, Susan, and they talked about combating that and getting rid of unfairness.

In our household, we have switched from Google over to Start Page. All we need to do now is wean ourselves from YouTube videos. 

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Are you a “Hate Agent?”

Allum Bokhari at Breitbart has this scary report:

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.

The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Full article is here.

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More bias and propaganda at Google

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From Allum Bokhari at Breitbart (h/t Blazing Cat Fur):

Google’s senior director of U.S. public policy, Adam Kovacevich appeared to describe the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as a “sideshow Circus,” in a leaked audio recording in which he also argued that Google should remain a sponsor of the conference to “steer” the conservative movement “away from nationalistic and incendiary comments.”

The comments came to light in leaked audio files allegedly of a company-wide meeting at Google, part of which is now exclusively reported by Breitbart News. 

Another part of the transcript was released last Friday on Tucker Carlson Tonight, while further snippets revealing Google’s funding of establishment conservative think-tanks were published by the left-leaning tech magazine Wired in December.

The alleged meeting took place in the wake of Google’s sponsorship of CPAC in 2018, which triggered an internal rebellion from left-wing employees of the tech giant. Breitbart News exclusively reported on the revolt at the time, in which radical left-wingers inside Google accused CPAC of “ethno-nationalism” and “hate.”

. . .

Read the rest here (scroll down for transcripts).

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Google memo 'The Good Censor'

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Yesterday’s blog was about the film Gosnell, free speech, and free markets. Now comes an American Thinker report by Thomas Lifson titled

“Stunning 85-page Google memo 

'The Good Censor' leaked to Breitbart”

Lifson's blog begins:

If you are not worried about the power of Google to shape debate and elections according to its leftist political bias, you're not paying attention.  I congratulate Breitbart.com for the scoop, and I urge everyone – I am looking at you, President Trump and Congress – to read and ponder the fate of the Republic unless this company is defanged, most likely by antitrust action, but possibly also via civil courts. 

He then quotes Allum Bokhari's introduction and summary of the memo here, including:

An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the "American tradition" of free speech on the internet is no longer viable. ...

[T]he 85-page briefing, titled "The Good Censor," admits that Google and other tech platforms now "control the majority of online conversations" and have undertaken a "shift towards censorship" in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a "utopian narrative" that has been "undermined" by recent global events as well as "bad behavior" on the part of users. ...

It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers.  "This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations," says the document.

The briefing argues that Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are caught between two incompatible positions, the "unmediated marketplace of ideas" vs. "well-ordered spaces for safety and civility."

Terrifying. The Breitbart scoop is here. Our household is exploring alternatives to Google, including Brave. Does anyone see an alternative to Facebook? 

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