Remember, CNN Hates You Too

Also Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Which is odd, because all of them see us more as product than customers. From Stacy McCain: How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent

Headline at Ace of Spades HQ:

Journalists or Activists? CNN,Which Admitted They Were Responsiblefor Getting Alex Jones Deplatformed fromYouTube, Apple, and FaceBook, Now AdmitsIt’s Also Pressuring Twitter to Deplatform Him

This is shameful. When I was working for The Washington Times, we did not seek to prevent the distribution of The Washington Post, nor during my years as a correspondent for The American Spectator have we ever sought to silence any competing publication. Yet CNN and other so-called “mainstream” media operations are now actively engaged in a smear campaign intended to “de-platform” alternative voices online.

It is now considered de rigueur to stipulate, before protesting against such social-media bans, that one does not like the banned person or agree with everything he says or does. People did this when Twitter suspended my @rsmccain account, which annoyed me to no end, because Twitter never even bothered to specify what had precipitated this banishment. I’d been on Twitter for seven years and had tens of thousands of followers, none of whom saw anything in my TL that would justify this suspension. Yet when I got banned, several journalists who wrote about this incident felt the need to describe me as “controversial” or whatever in the process of lamenting this evidence that commissars of the Thought Police had obtained hegemonic authority at Twitter.

Why? Isn’t it obvious that these journalists wanted to convey the idea that I must be a special case, “controversial” in some way that made me different from other accounts which had not been banned?

The fact of the matter was (a) that I was simply more effective than some others in calling attention to obstreperous leftists on Twitter, and (b) that I had made influential enemies as a result of this.

Keep in mind that I was hate-listed by the SPLC long before it became routine for them to traffic in such dangerous libel. Circa 1999, the SPLC decided that “neo-Confederates” were a menace and, because I had then just recently been hired by The Washington Times, my name got mentioned in their account due to my previous association with the League of South. Now, it is a mistake to get down in tall grass discussing all the so-called “evidence” involved in the kind of smear campaigns the Left pursues against its chosen enemies. However, after more than a decade of being an independent blogger, don’t you think that if I were a “white supremacist” (as the SPLC has called me), that I would have published something that would suffice as proof of this?

The SPLC is the classic case of something started as a cause, becoming a business, and then degenerating into a con.

Nothing of the kind ever happened, however, and when Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs tried to revive this “white supremacist” nonsense in September 2009, he made himself an object of ridicule and has long since departed into irrelevant obscurity: “Charles Who?”

Vindicating myself in l’affaire de LGF had the effect of making me a target for the Left during the Tea Party era leading up to the 2010 election, in large measure because leftists are incapable of admitting when they’re wrong. If the SPLC has called me a “white supremacist,” the leftist believes, I must be a very bad person, and this belief becomes the premise for further “investigation” of my allegedly hateful opinions.

So I was continually monitored by the Left all during the many ensuing years, as I ping-ponged around the country doing campaign-trail coverage and occasionally engaging in conflicts with personalities like Neal Rauhauser, Brett Kimberlin and Barrett Brown. Some readers may recall, for example, how the Kate Hunt case in 2013 involved covering the swarm of #FreeKate lunatics who thought there ought to be a lesbian loophole in Florida’s age-of-consent laws, so that she could get a free pass for diddling a 14-year-old. When you cover stories like that in Gonzo mode, you may acquire particularly obnoxious and persistent enemies.

All of this is by way of offering the most likely explanation of why, in February 2016, my @rsmccain Twitter account was permanently suspended for “participating in targeted abuse,” even though no one could say (a) who was “targeted”; (b) what kind of “abuse” they had suffered; or (c) how I was “participating” in this harmful activity.
. . .
Is Alex Jones more “racist” than, say, Jordan Peterson or Charles Murray? Is Alex Jones a “conspiracy theorist” in a way that, say, Jim Hoft or Pamela Geller are not? Is Alex Jones more “controversial” than, say, Glenn Reynolds or Rush Limbaugh? Do you see my point here?

There are many reasons I should include disclaimers to “distance” myself, as they say, from Alex Jones. He was a 9/11 “Truther” back in the day, and personally I have a hard time forgiving him for siccing a mob of his supporters on Michelle Malkin at the 2008 DNC in Denver. Yet this is not why Alex Jones is being de-platformed now. Rather, CNN and others on the Left are seeking to silence Alex Jones because he has been effective in calling attention to various facts that the Left desperately seeks to conceal from the general public. Please go read the entirely of the Ace of Spades post about this and ask yourself: “Who’s next?”

It could be me. Blogger is run by Google, and they provide this blogging platform free. I don't pay for anything but a small token fee for image hosting. They don't even get any advertising money out of me, although I assume they harvest clicks in their infernal quest to understand what interests you have.

Although I tend to libertarian points of view, I believe that the big social network platforms should be held to a higher standard for viewpoint discrimination. Ted Cruz hinted around at this in his grilling of Mark Zuckerberg:



Cruz is making a legal point. If a company like an ISP or, say Facebook, acts a neutral public forum, they are exempt from claims of damage arising from anyone's actions of speech on their forum. If they are not a neutral public forum, they can be held liable for actions of their customers on their forums. We need to hold them to that standard.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (a common name for Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996) is a landmark piece of Internet legislation in the United States, codified at 47 U.S.C. § 230. Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In analyzing the availability of the immunity offered by this provision, courts generally apply a three-prong test. A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:

1. The defendant must be a "provider or user" of an "interactive computer service."
2. The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must treat the defendant as the "publisher or speaker" of the harmful information at issue.
3. The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue.