Amerika

Ah, election year! When the air is sharp and reeks of censorship, and suddenly all of those nice impartial companies begin acting like agents of the Soviet Union in order to further world Leftism, simply because they hired a ton of SJWs and took Chinese investment during the Obama years.

Our tour today starts with Discord, who after doxxing Right-wingers a couple years ago, has moved up to banning communities for “misinformation” which roughly means anything that upsets the Leftist narrative:

But now even these invite-only, non-public conversations are being censored under similar misinformation rules that are deployed against public-facing posts on Big Tech platforms.

Discord’s crackdown is reflective of the growing pressure from lawmakers, the mainstream media, and Big Tech companies to start moderating conversations that take place between friends, groups, and communities.

Astute observers will note that banning certain content makes it easy to ban certain individuals; just find someone to send them that banned content, and then you can “notice” it and ban them. Leftists employ this ruthlessly, sending in suicide accounts to post insane stuff that they then report with their main accounts, causing the removal of any offending conservatives.

As you may recall, the Chinese bought into Discord some time ago:

The last time Discord raised cash was in April of this year, when they raised $50 million in funding at a $1.65 billion valuation. The company has only grown since then, as the influx of further cash and higher valuation demonstrate. The latest funding came primarily from investment group Greenoaks Capital, as well as from other funders like Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Oh look, Tencent. Many American companies have found themselves banned in China until they solicit investment from Tencent and give China a vote on the board and, presumably, some say in who they hire, which allows them to hire radical Leftists who then get paid big bucks for the relatively easy job of censorship.

Discord previously avoided looking into private messages and private groups. But now, they are openly doing so. Reddit admits that it reads private mail. Facebook does the same. Now Sony has picked up on that idea, and is aiming to listen to private conversations with the aim of “safety and moderation”:

Concerns about the privacy implications of this voice recording feature started to spread on social media when players installed the PlayStation 4 (PS4) system software update 8.00 and were presented with a notification stating: “Voice chats may be recorded for moderation. By joining, you agree to be recorded.”

In other words, you no longer have any privacy, and if someone complains, they will roll the tapes to see what they can find to justify banning you. They will keep the money you paid, of course. Sounds like a moneymaker, sort of like speed traps or service fees.

Similar things are happening at Facebook, which finds itself not yet banned in China because Facebook has been hiring Chinese censors who most likely come with the blessings of the DNC/CCP:

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

[One] software engineer previously worked for the Communist-backed conglomerate Huawei, as well as the Beijing National Railway & Design Institute of Signal and Communication.

These are both State-owned or State-controlled apparatus in China, which also has a legal system that forces companies to cooperate with the State even if they are privately owned. When the Ministry of State Security says you censor conservatives so the Left can destroy America, you say 是的!

Speaking of Reddit, the internet’s hugbox of the smartest of the dumbest (“eckshually”) continues its rampage by changing tactics from censoring speech to remove all conservatives who are not obedient to its plan for conservatives to be “Christian libertarians” who bemoan the death of civilization but do nothing to stop it. It kicked off the Reddit election 2020 censorship binge with removing the DarkEnlightenment moderators, forcing the sub to be taken over by Reddit-approved movement conservative cucks, just as it did to The_Donald before:

About a month after the last ban wave occurred, the harassment from the sub-reddit “againsthatesubreddits” began. They present themselves as just passionate, crazy leftists. I am sure that is true in many cases, but the fact is this sort of harassment seems to have picked up all across the internet to any vaguely right-leaning community or group of people. Most recently conservative publishers on amazon. The ubiquity and simultaneity of the harassment pretty much everywhere makes me think this is an election year paid operation similar but more extreme than 2016’s shareblue shills. I honestly wish we could make paid shilling a crime punished by execution. Slow, public execution for the funders and organizers.

The main technique employed by this group or groups when they want to get something banned is to make alternate shill accounts which they use to generate “offensive” content, which can then be reported by their main accounts. If enough of this gets through, due to poor moderation, that creates the public justification to ban the community. That is, I assume, how they justified banning /r/The_donald. It helps when the admins are covertly working with the agitators, because then rules against brigading, harrassment, and multple account abuse only get enforced against one side. Classic anarcho-tyranny. This is exactly the case for AHS, one or more of their moderators are admins. And I suspect more admins are involved behind the scenes. I wouldn’t even be surprised if many of the Anti-evil operations censors were hired from active participants of AHS. Well, that and from the CCP.

This shows Reddit removing all of its actually conservative communities and replacing them with the libertarian Christian version, which basically says, “I don’t care what you do so long as I can do whatever I want, but I’ll tut-tut you for going to Hell.” Essentially, the usual Enlightenment anarchy.

Why do these bans seem to come in clusters? Answer: the Chinese masters cracked the whip, and the SJWs in charge of the media and social media coordinate their activities — response with a new talking point to the failure of narrative — through a backchannel, sort of like the early-2000s JournoList which was resurrected in a new form as GameJournoPros.

One wonders what the game-plan of the Big Tech companies might be. Andrew Torba from Gab points out that the section 230 focus may be a deflection:

When Big Tech “fact checks” user content they are acting as a publisher and Section 230 immunity does not apply. As such, they can be held accountable for that speech.

Section 230 doesn’t apply to Big Tech’s editorializing. The First Amendment does. Section 230 only applies to content that users post on their platforms. It provides no protections for Big Tech’s own speech. They can and should be punished for the false information they are giving the public by weaponizing this editorialization of user content

The point here is that, much like in political correctness, the Left’s editorializing does not consist of telling you what to say, but in removing everything that you say which does not fit with what they want to hear. This turns you into a puppet, with your only public statements being pro-Leftist.

A classic inversion results. If you take great literature and remove everything that is not egalitarian, you end up with propaganda for egalitarianism. The same is true of user-generated content: remove the real conservatives, boost the cucks, and you create a false appearance of consensus.

Why are they doing this? Two reasons: one, they can. Any group given power will abuse it unless that group has a purpose other than accruing power. This leads to the second point, which is that they are doing this because their business model is failing.

In a nutshell, internet advertising does not work as well as people think it does, and most of the users on the internet come from a relatively small group with low purchasing power. This means that ad prices will crash because they are more like bus ads than TV ads, easily ignored and only read by those who are broke already.

To keep its power, Big Tech has doubled down on the groups it wants: American SJWs, widely viewed as the “new hippies,” and the cell phone audience who are just looking for minimal distraction at their boring jobs, classes, or incarceration sentences. Big Tech wants to have a large number of warm bodies, and it has chosen the warm bodies that are easiest to acquire, namely those without a clue, especially since Left-leaning people tend to consume a lot more media than Right-leaning ones.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 79% of liberals use social networking sites, while only 63% of conservatives do the same.

A possible reason for the difference? Age. 92% of those aged 18-29 reported using social networking, 73% of 30-49 year-olds said the same, and 57% of those aged 50-64 said so.

About a third of social media users in the United States post their feelings about politics, another third of social media users promote political content on their networks, 35% have used social media to encourage others to vote, 28% have shared news stories about politics and 20% follow elected officials and candidates.

In other words, the Democrat audience — young broke and dumb, minority, or Chinese Communist — attends social media, especially since the introduction of the smartphone in 2007. This new audience hates conservatives and therefore, has been sold to the highest bidder (CCP/DNC) in order for Big Media to continue maintaining the illusion of its relevance.

However, other people also pay attention to social media, since two-thirds of American adults report using it, which makes them the target: social media intends to use manufactured consensus to convince the rest of us that the relatively few SJWs and Chinese spies are “normal” in America now.

Consequently, we are seeing idiocy across the board as Facebook bans satire in an attempt to control the narrative in the wake of the Hunter Biden revelations:

The article, headlined “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch,” uses humor to suggest a fictional depiction of Hirono thinks Barrett is a witch and should be weighed against a duck.

Remember that Facebook hires morons to censor its content not just to enforce an agenda, but because post-1960s America has a lot of screwed-up people who post screwed-up stuff.

As of yesterday, Reddit finally got around to banning the conservative mods of Ask A Conservative, a project I built from nothing into a major source for actual information about why conservatives think as they do. This clashed with their idea of neutering conservatives into liberals who like the military and patriotism, since that group will always role over for the Left while loudly bloviating about principle and rugged individualism, much as Republicans have done since the era of William F. Buckley.

Our struggle is real. The Left intends to use civil rights to crush us and replace us, in our place adopting a permanent third world dictatorship. Like social media, they only care about the number of warm bodies, not the quality of output.

Tags: andrew torba, atavisionary, censorship, discord, dot-com 3.0, facebook, reddit