Big Tech censorship of conservatives: impartial rules, or partisan malice?

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine,

Censorship can’t truly shut down conservatives, but it keeps conservative voices from having a secure foothold in social media, while offering every possible benefit and subsidy to their leftist rivals.

Any active conservative knows that he can be silenced, at any moment, by a motivated crybullying campaign backed by lefty media outlets, as Crowder was, or by the sweep of the algorithmic scythe. The overall effect is to make it clear that the internet and social media are the native territory of leftists. Conservatives can only be occasional trespassers, living on the internet as tokens or guerrillas.

There can hardly be a formula more conducive to a state of political radicalism.

Censorship won’t make social media less divisive, as its advocates insist. The echo chamber of the press, radio and television that the media, named after these three mediums, dreams of returning to is impossible. What censorship really does is radicalize activists by giving them another enemy to fight.

YouTube’s censorship campaign, like those of other social media companies, is based on secretive algorithms, black box moderation, and confusing policies that are being selectively implemented. The big dot coms and their media inciters pretend that cleaning up the internet can be easily done. In reality, they can’t even clearly state the problem in a way that would stand up to any regulatory oversight.

The new YouTube policy cracks down on “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.” Will that policy be applied to videos like, “White People are Evil”, “Dear White People, Kill Yourself Now”, and “All White People are Racist”? The Nation of Islam’s YouTube channel is humming along with offerings like, “Critical Thinking Outlawed as Anti-Semitism”.

Taken literally, it would ban a video arguing for raising the drinking age or the driving age.

But policies like these are not meant to be taken literally, they’re something to point to so that the censorship of conservatives appears to be the result of impartial rules, rather than partisan malice.

…When the rules are unclear, all the standards are double standards. Dot coms hide behind the illusion of policy when, as Steven Crowder’s case revealed, their responses aren’t determined by written policies, but by pressure campaigns and gut reactions, with the policies as little more than retroactive excuses.

…There is a more American solution that wouldn’t turn us into an obscene Orwellian cartoon.

It’s called freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech means letting people say whatever they want as long as they aren’t engaging in criminal behavior like sending death threats, molesting children or otherwise breaking the law.

…The censorship of the internet is a futile project conducted in bad faith for bad purposes. Like the censorship projects of every totalitarian regime and ideology, it will fail. The only question is how many people will be hurt along the way. Speech can’t be stopped. People, individually, can be destroyed.

That is what is at stake here.

YouTube’s latest disaster is a painful demonstration of the limitations of moderation and censorship. But the internet was never meant to be moderated. And trying to do so is a doomed proposition. There’s too much content, too many people and machine learning can never compensate for human cunning.

Free speech isn’t just a good idea. It’s not a nice slogan. Speech wants to be free.

It takes more energy to censor than to speak. Hunting down and silencing people you don’t like is a lot more work than making your own argument. Entropy is not on the side of the speech suppressors.

Natural rights are not just a philosophical position. They’re innate human realities. Repressing them is the equivalent of damming a river. It futilely restrains a natural force that will eventually break free.

YouTube tried to dam the river. But the river, the billions of hours of video, will always overflow.

Read more here.