Thursday, April 20, 2017

When Corporations Go Beyond Just Lobbying

Lately, there seems to be a coordinated effort by various social media outlets to de-platform “alternative” opinions on the Internet through various means.  YouTube, for instance, has been lying about video views and comment counts, actively hiding comments from several users.  Google (YouTube’s owner) has been modifying their search algorithms to make Democrats look better.

Meanwhile, when alternatives are presented, they are blackballed.  Gab, a popular alternative to Twitter, was blocked from the Apple iPhone store because it contained “adult content”.  Of course, a kid with an iPhone can follow his favorite porn actress on Twitter complete with promo pictures.  But that’s neither here nor there.

And then some people are finding themselves demonetized on YouTube.  YouTube allows content producers to run ads on their videos.  Lately, the value has dropped though and not just for Alt-Right figures.  I’ve heard of Let’s Play producers seeing a cut in their bottom line as well.

This last situation could just be the contracting economy really.  I suspect that YouTube got a lot of its revenue to pay its users from Federal subsidies (I can’t confirm this) and that when that well dried up with the rise of a Republican administration, YouTube is now looking to tighten its belt.

And then there’s PayPal, which has suddenly started to disable itself for many users.  Roosh V, owner and creator of Return of Kings, found himself without a PayPal account.  When he inquired as to why, he was told to get a subpoena.  This also happened to a YouTuber who was investigating PizzaGate.

Many of these services should really be treated as a public utility by the government.  At least then, theoretically, they would face severe fines for shutting off access for political “violations”.  There’s a reason that you still have water and power, despite voting Republican, and it has nothing to do with profits.

I do suggest that corporations should remain politically neutral in all their dealings.  And many corporations do that, mostly because many corporations aren’t converged with Social Justice Warriors and other assorted zombie commies.  For some reason, the worst of our society seems to have converged on crucial tech companies and taken over in order to dictate policy.

Communists can’t help themselves.  Give them even slight power and they’ll try to rule all they see in the name of farcical Utopianism.  And that is exactly what has happened to the tech sector.

The only solution in the short term that I can see is that various people band together and file a class action lawsuit against these various companies, declaring them to be public utilities and demanding they be held accountable for their communist bullshit.

I would be surprised if President Trump has Attorney General Jeff Sessions look into this.  My guess is that it would only happen if they suspended his personal Twitter account and then it would only affect Twitter.

The long term solution is to build alternative platforms to all these different Social Media sites.  We already have Infogalactic, an alternative to Wikipedia, and Gab, an alternative to Twitter.  There are others in the works and there are alternatives to the big ones, but we have to be patient or innovate ourselves.

And such work takes years to accomplish.  So don’t expect a new service overnight or even a year from now.