If I Wanted America To Fail Video Goes Viral, Twitter suspends groups account

From Dateline Zero

Over the previous weekend, a video produced by Free Market America went live on YouTube. “If I wanted America to fail” went viral during the week, gaining a huge number of views leading up to Earth Day.

Breitbart.com and HotAir.com both embedded the video on the 22nd. “If I wanted America to fail” got over 120,000 hits in less than 36 hours. (Drudge Report linked to the video later, which helped the video gain a huge amount of visibility.)

And then the Twitter page for Free Market America, the group behind the video, was suspended midway through Earth Day!

The video is very critical of government-mandated environmental policies, and thus the release of the video the weekend of Earth Day. April 23, Michelle Malkin posted: “For some reason still unknown, Twitter suspended the group’s account. They’ve tried to get answers about the cause of the suspension. But no replies.”

After an outcry from supporters, NetRightDaily reports that Twitter “unsuspended” the group’s account without much of an explanation. Of course Twitter restored the account after Earth Day.

The official explanation is that the account was the victim of an “automated spam filter.”

What’s the deal with Twitter and Google lately?

Malkin makes the observation: “This is just bizarre. The Kill Zimmerman account was left untouched for weeks before finally being taken down. What is Free Market America guilty of? Advocating free markets. Is that against Twitter terms of service??”

It seems that both Twitter and Google have been pandering to the so-called “powers that be” in the past few years. As Adam Bitely at NetRightDaily noted:

In the summer of 2009, hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in Tehran, Iran to protest the phony election results that showed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning re-election. The world was able to watch these protests unfold over Twitter and the protestors themselves were able to use Twitter as a tool for coordinating their activities.

People all over the world were given a front row seat to watch a protest through the eyes of the protestor. In early 2011, protestors took to the streets in Egypt and toppled their government. This happened in Libya as well. And Tunisia.

In all of these instances, Twitter has served as a powerful tool that allows people the ability to communicate with each over and spread a message far and wide.

Google was proud to have done what they could during the uprisings in Egypt as well. Both Twitter and Google seem to love helping political activism… but their support only goes so far. There seems to be certain political messages that they will not only not support, but they will do what they can to silence perceived critics of certain administrations.

When Glenn Beck held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010, Google did what it could to send people away. Anyone trying to use Google Maps to find the Memorial was sent to the wrong location. Typing “Lincoln Memorial” into the regular Google search bar showed a map of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. Ha ha.

What’s going to happen when people begin using Google’s self driving cars to get to a political event that someone at Google finds objectionable?

When a blogger exposed a major flaw in the TSA’s scanners, Google responded by restricting access to that blogger’s video. This was particularly creepy, because Google forced people to log in with their accounts to view the video in question — which meant they had a record of everyone wanting to view the video via that blogger’s YouTube channel.

Forunately the video had been posted elsewhere, including at LiveLeak.

The morning after French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced he would seek re-election, a handful of satire accounts on Twitter were “mysteriously” suspended. When Syria’s Asma al-Assad took objection with some Twitter users, people at Twitter dutifully suspended those accounts. (Well, to be fair, Twitter only suspended most of the accounts that made Asma al-Assad unhappy.)

This leads me to wonder if someone in the White House took exception with the “If I wanted America to fail” video? Or maybe an employee at Twitter simply thought Free Market America was ruining his Earth Day.

This also leads me to believe that alternatives to Google and Twitter and Facebook are very valuable. Original post at Dateline Zero