Internet Censorship: Running Wild

By Lee Duigon  /  News With Views

First they kicked Alex Jones off the social media, and then they wiped Fellowship of the Minds off WordPress—allegedly for violating WordPress’ Terms of Service. No warning was given, no explanation offered. If you look for Fellowship of the Minds, all you’ll find is a notice that it’s “now unavailable.”

Can we deduce the reason by examining those Terms of Service? Let’s quote the only lines that might seem to apply:

“Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your website as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely [two-minute laugh break]. However, be responsible in what you publish. In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items (like spam, viruses, or serious threats of violence) appear on your website”.

It doesn’t appear Fellowship of the Minds committed any of those transgressions. WordPress is owned and operated by Automattic Inc. We have some remarks by Automattic’s CEO, Matt Mullenweg, as to the need to shut out “hate speech,” whatever that may be, and “egregiously false or harmful things.”

Meanwhile, the buzz on the Internet is that both Alex Jones and Fellowship got banned for promoting a conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax by the Obama regime staged to drum up support for gun control. Maybe that’s one of those egregiously false or harmful things.

I don’t like conspiracy theories. I especially don’t like the one that says Donald Trump “colluded” with “the Russians” to steal the 2016 election from the rightful president, our beloved Hillary Clinton; but you don’t see any of the media shutting that one down, do you? So we wind up with this absurd scenario in which the people who really did collude with foreigners to swing the election their way are, ahem, “investigating” the people who didn’t.

Anyhow, they say Alex Jones and Fellowship of the Minds made this claim. I don’t know if they did or didn’t, because I choose not to read conspiracy theories. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that they did make it. Well, so what?

But this made them easy targets for the censorship crowd, because that whole Sandy Hook conspiracy theory rubs a lot of people the wrong way and I suppose the thinking was that nobody would bother to defend anyone who made such an unpopular claim. Again, so what?

Free speech must include unpopular speech. In fact, if it doesn’t, then the very concept of free speech is rendered meaningless—as it has certainly become, in the minds of liberals. They try to shut down anything that they don’t want to hear, whether it’s true or not.

The free market will eventually generate alternative media platforms that do not ban unpopular opinions—but not in time for this year’s midterm elections. It looks like these media are trying to shut everybody up so that Democrats can win the elections and take over Congress.

But it’s not only on the Internet that leftids are trying to achieve “diversity” by allowing only one opinion.

UCLA has hired twenty “Diversity Peer Leaders,” at $13 an hour, paid for by mandatory student fees. And what does a Diversity Peer Leader do, for 13 bucks an hour? Apparently their function is to fight “toxic masculinity” and “microaggression” on campus—by ratting out any of their fellow students who might think this is all nonsense. You’ll have to be careful what you say on campus, or the Diversity Peer Leaders will brand you a “bigot” and derail your college career. They are a species of “community organizer,” a la Mao Tse-tung’s Red Guards; and at the rate things are going, we’ll one day find them off the campus spying on us at work or play—just to make sure nobody has the wrong opinion about anything.

What is taking form here is a kind of viewpoint monopoly created by social media technocrats to keep everybody in line. Congress ought to act to rein it in, but we needn’t hold our breath for that. It’s unfair, and not strictly Constitutional, to lay this on the president: but most of the time it seems Donald Trump’s the only one in Washington who’ll go to bat for the American people.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com. Before I get censored, too, stop in for a visit. A single click will take you there.

© 2018 Lee Duigon – All Rights Reserved

https://newswithviews.com/internet-censorship-running-wild/

More great articles here: https://newswithviews.com

Lee Duigon, a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist. He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar, available on www.amazon.com 

Website: http://LeeDuigon.com

E-Mail: [email protected]