BOKHARI: The Stakes in 2018 — Tyranny by Silicon Valley and Far-Left Corporations
by Allum Bokhari
BreitBart.com
3 Nov 2018
Imagine living in a world where a few executives in Silicon Valley, along with a couple of credit card companies, get to control what you say, who you interact with, what causes you can support, whose products you can buy and whether you can run a business.
Political domination by Silicon Valley and progressive corporations likely outcome if Republican voters don’t turn out in sufficient numbers this Tuesday.
America has already caught a glimpse of the coming corporate dystopia. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a massive, largely unchecked assault on Americans’ ability to enjoy their constitutional freedoms, led by unaccountable CEOs and relentlessly encouraged by Democrats and the establishment media.
The most striking example of this undemocratic collusion between political factions and corporations was the mass-ban of Alex Jones and Infowars. Love him or loathe him, Jones was the most censored man in media this year, facing permanent bans from Apple podcasts, Apple’s App Store, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Mailchimp, and even Pinterest. The mass purge followed weeks of lobbying by CNN for Silicon Valley to take action.
Other conservative figures who have been blacklisted by big tech this year include CRTV host Gavin McInnes (on both Twitter and Facebook), Islam critic Tommy Robinson, Republican organizer R.C. Maxwell, and former adviser to President Nixon, Roger Stone.
Meanwhile, far-left extremists like the notorious racist and recent New York Times hire Sarah Jeong are given privileged treatment by social media companies. Despite engaging in hate speech that would get a conservative banned in minutes, Jeong was verified by Twitter, guaranteeing that her tweets will be promoted in the influential platform’s algorithm. Also verified — Sleeping Giants, a group whose sole purpose is to spread misinformation and slander about conservative news publications to their advertisers.
Social media companies don’t have to ban any kind of lawful speech. They could easily devolve that power to users via opt-in filters. But even as the platforms have become modern public squares — essential arenas for Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights — they have developed a ceaselessly expanding list of rules, regulations, and prohibitions on lawful speech.
The social media platforms and their allies in the Democrat-corporate media complex avoid public use of the word “censorship” to describe these policies. Democrats go so far as to call it a conspiracy theory. But thanks to a leaked internal briefing from Google, we know that big tech privately admits what we all know to be true — that a few companies now control the majority of online speech, and that they’ve shifted towards censorship.
Beyond social media censorship, conservatives are being choked off financially. Under pressure from Mastercard and the far-left SPLC, the online donations site Patreon cut off support to Islam critic Robert Spencer earlier this year. Because the pressure comes from the banks and credit card companies at the very top of the financial food chain, it’s also impossible to simply set up a free-speech oriented competitor to Patreon — attempts to do so, in the form of FreeStartr and MakerSupport, were effectively ended when the online payment processors Stripe and PayPal withdrew their services.
The Rest…HERE
