art credit: 2012patriot.wordpress.com
Most days I visit several news aggregators to find reports,
analyses, and commentary. A couple of weeks ago, one of the aggregators,
Lucianne.com, was down for several days. It wasn’t the first time it went down,
and I wonder about why it happened. For the last two days, another aggregator,
Politipage, has gone blank. Hmm. Maybe these were just technical crashes. Both these aggregators lean conservative.
In what are probably related developments, some prominent
conservative voices have been demonetized or blocked from Facebook or other
platforms. Among them are Diamond and Silk, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Avi Yemini.
Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today titled “When Digital Platforms Become Censors: Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants say that they’re open forums. What
happens when they start to shut down voices they consider beyond the pale?”:
Call 2018 the “Year of
Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices
to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants
decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If
you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially
ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only
for free speech but for the future of American politics and media.
That’s his opener. The rest of his commentary is here.
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