Many of us have delusions about the freedom of information on the internet, but the truth is that companies like Facebook and Google are companies owned and operated by people who have political views, just like you and I do. Their political agenda is something that they will promote at whatever premium they deem appropriate. Unfortunately, all we can do is make sure people are in the know about what’s happening, and decide whether to do business with these big companies.
One political commentator and outspoken conservative has had a decade-long battle with YouTube over her content that they deemed to be unacceptable.
Here is Michelle Malkin’s story of censorship:
One of the many maddening takeaways from the London Bridge jihad attack is this: If you post videos on YouTube radicalizing Muslim viewers to kill innocent people, YouTube will leave you alone.
But if you post a video on YouTube honoring innocent people murdered by barbaric jihadists, your video will get banned.
I know. It happened to me in 2006. Eleven years later, the selective censors at Google-YouTube still can’t competently distinguish terrorist hate speech from political free speech. Islamic hate preachers such as Ahmad Musa Jibril, whose bloodthirsty rants against non-Muslims reportedly inspired the London Bridge ringleader, have flourished.
My two-minute clip, which I titled “First, They Came,” spotlighted authors, editors, politicians, and other targets of Islamic intolerance and violence.
Several months later, YouTube yanked the innocuous, harmless, nonviolent, nonprofane, nonhateful, and nonthreatening mini-film. The company informed me that the video contained “inappropriate content.” I complained across social media — posting additional YouTube videos calling attention to the ban. But “First, They Came” stayed deep-sixed on my YouTube channel. Other bloggers and video consumers tried to subvert the censors by posting the clip on their sites; it became a game of whack-a-mole as the YouTube police hunted it down.
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a New York Times magazine article on “Google’s Gatekeepers” that he “watched the ‘First, They Came’ video, which struck me as powerful political commentary that contains neither hate speech nor graphic violence, and I asked why it was taken down. According to a YouTube spokesman, the takedown was a routine one that hadn’t been reviewed by higher-ups.”
Only after receiving fair exposure in The New York Times (my, how times and the Times have changed) did the video magically reappear on my channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGWXERf45gU
Is it really fair to do this? No, I don’t think that it is, but then again, life isn’t fair. The point of this is to remind you that what you see (and don’t see) online is being carefully crafted into a narrative that supports a political agenda of whoever has controlling interested in that particular platform.
Go, and be informed, but remember that your information is slanted, and you still need to use your brain and look around for sources of information that you can trust, while they’re still around to be accessed.
(Source: Michelle Malkin)
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