The owner of the irreverent, muckraking Turtleboy Sports blog knows a thing or two, to borrow language from that TV commercial for an insurance company, about online censorship. The entertaining and provocative Massachusetts-based investigative journalism portal — plus its slightly toned down, less vulgar TB Daily News version — focuses mainly on municipal corruption, felonious activity, and welfare scammers and assorted “hoodrats,” rather than sports. Given that the big social media networks have repeatedly de-platformed Turtleboy Sports and associated sites, owner “Uncle Turtleboy” claims that he “invented” tech censorship.
Responding to the recent ban of controversial, fringe actor Alex Jones and Infowars, among several others, Uncle Turtleboy explained that “I take it very personally because I’ve been getting banned by these tech companies since before anyone gave a sh*t about censorship. Turtleboy INVENTED tech censorship. I warned the world about it, but no one cared because it could never happen to them. Well now it is.”
By shutting down the quirky Jones and several other Internet personalities on the same day, Big Tech is engaging in election meddling and committing civil rights violations, Uncle Turtleboy declared. This is only the beginning as Big Tech plans to silence more mainstream Trump supporters (and they already have) in the run-up to the 2020 election, he noted. What’s worse, by doing nothing about it, the Trump administration and the GOP are digging their own political graves.
Parenthetically, Big Tech seldom, if ever, takes action against leftists no matter how abusive or threatening their online behavior becomes.
Free speech attorney Harmeet Dhillon similarly warned that Republicans and “normal conservatives” will “lose every election going forward” unless Republicans wake up and put a stop to social media bias.
Some conservatives justify their inaction on the basis of their devotion to the “free market.” While it’s true that the First Amendment does not apply to the private sector workplace, with their monopolistic hold on social media, these Big Tech platforms could be regulated under anti-trust laws. Calls have also increased to regulate the social media giants like public utilities.
Actual Election Meddling/Collusion
Uncle Turtleboy continues about the recent bans:
“There’s nothing dangerous about any of these people, especially [Paul Joseph] Watson. Laura Loomer is a joke. No one takes her seriously. Alex Jones is an entertainer, and people who take him seriously are harmless. But mostly they’re not dangerous because words in and of themselves are not dangerous. And when we start banning speech because it could hypothetically incite violence, we are no longer free because we’re blaming the speech instead of the violence itself.
“The precedent that’s being set here is what’s dangerous. Some things that Watson, Jones, Loomer, and Milo have in common – opposition to illegal immigration, support for gun rights, resistance to letting boys become girls and beat girls in sports, support for Trump. [Big Tech is] saying that having conservative opinions is in and of itself dangerous. And they’re setting up the groundwork for 2020 by slowly eliminating some of Trump’s strongest supporters from social media. Trump is the first social media President. He won largely because he mastered it before anyone else.
“So it’s time to start calling this exactly what it is – election meddling. Social media is where political discourse takes place. Every single candidate for office in 2020 will have a social media team because social media is not something you can afford to ignore anymore, because most people use it on a daily basis. Kicking people with millions of followers off your platform prevents them from sharing ideas and beliefs with millions of people and that effects how people vote. These people were diehard Trump supporters and were instrumental in his victory in 2016. Congress is blaming the Russians for election meddling when the real culprits are in Silicon Valley.“
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Despite their worship (theoretical, anyway) of civil liberties, 99 percent of Democrats, progressives, and diversity advocates are seemingly okay with censorship. Paul Joseph Watson, who apparently plans to sue Facebook for defamation, made this observation:
“[A]ccording to the new left, it is now ‘progressive’ to allow a handful of corporate monopolists to control who has free speech and what opinions they can communicate… It’s almost like they aren’t actually liberal, have no actual principles, and are just feverish authoritarians who want to harness the power of corporate behemoths to silence their ideological opposition.”
Watson also issues a warning about future election outcomes:
“It’s not implausible to suggest that given the increasingly online nature of political campaigns, if platform neutrality is not secured, we could never see a Republican (or more accurately a true ‘America first’ Republican) in the White House ever again.”
Civil Rights Violations?
More from Uncle Turtleboy:
“None of these people should be banned from Twitter because Twitter is a civil right. And yes, that’s exactly what access to platforms is – a civil right. Civil rights are not the same thing as constitutional rights. They are rights that the government can create through legislation…Platform rights are the same thing. Everyone should have access to online platforms regardless of the things they say. Everyone.
“The scary part about this is how the left and the media cheers this on… But as bad as liberals are, ‘conservatives’ who think this is OK are even worse. Every single one of these frauds has one thing in common – they’ve never been censored. If they were then they’d know what it feels like to have a voice and then have that voice snatched away from you…. Private companies don’t have the right to ban people for no reason, which is what they’ve done today. Private companies don’t have the right to create monopolies on free speech, which is what they’ve done over time.. Where does this end exactly? Conservatism has never been about allowing radical leftists to control what we say and manipulate our elections…
“If the government regulates social media and AOC becomes President and kicks me off, then I can sue because it’s officially the government banning speech and that’s a First Amendment violation. I’d take this any day of the week over what we currently have. As it currently stands they can get away with this because it’s not the government banning speech. That ends once it’s nationalized. My phone company has more regulations than Facebook, a fraction of the users, and multiple competitors. That’s what the role of the government in commerce is – to make sure megacorporations aren’t monopolizing and using their power to deny services to citizens.
“Make no doubt about it conservatives – they’re coming for you next…
“Of course Trump will do nothing because he’s never been censored either, and he’s too old to understand how any of this works. He could fix this with a quick executive order, or by just leaving these platforms because they’d beg him to come back. He makes them more money than anyone, and gets Twitter’s brand name on the nightly news every single day. Instead he’ll just whine about how it’s ‘totally unfair’ and go back to talking about the wall.
“Here’s my question – What’s more dangerous – handing free speech rights over to the government, or handing them over to radical leftist billion dollar corporations in Silicon Valley?
“This is an age thing too. Younger conservatives, and older conservatives who are active on social media, are the ones who get it. They understand how vital this space is for democracy…”
Don’t Just Take Turtleboy’s Word for It
Against this backdrop, Human Events global editor Raheem Kassam also asserted that platform access “across the Silicon Valley Cartel” is a civil right. “The digital space is as important as the public square now,” he said, in the context of suppressing conservative content.
Kassam’s Human Events colleague Will Chamberlain, an attorney, takes it a step further:
“Platform access is a civil right. You should now have the same right to speak on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that you do in a public park. This is not the current state of the law…Access to the large social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – is a prerequisite to meaningful free speech in 2019…The vast majority of serious public debate takes place there. Thus, access to large social media platforms is a civil right…Conservatives should focus on passing legislation – at BOTH the state and federal levels – that protects all citizens’ access to large social media platforms on civil rights grounds. Access should be forfeitable only if one engages in unlawful speech on a platform…If a large social media company wrongfully denies you access to or removes you from their platform or, you should be able to walk into court, get an injunction against the company that forces them to restore your account, and be awarded substantial statutory damages…By creating a private right of action that allows citizens to walk into court and get their accounts restored, it will be judges – not regulators – that protect the civil right to platform access.”
Who Will Police the Thought Police?
In a separate essay posted on Human Events, Kassam blasted well-heeled yet oblivious Republican donors for failing to fund competing outlets to the Big Tech monopoly.
His experience in trying to fundraise for the relaunched Human Events led him to the conclusion that fat cats are more concerned with “tax breaks and tax cuts for themselves.”
“Conservative donors don’t want to invest in or donate to start-ups in this arena. For them, there’s no tax break in giving to an LLC, and there’s certainly no direct effect on policy making in the arena of low taxes by backing a free speech endeavor… Despite a heavy number of rightist voices being muzzled online, the ‘right wing mega donors’ are nowhere on this issue… The psychopaths of Silicon Valley aren’t going to stop with Paul Joseph Watson and/or Laura Loomer. They’re shifting the Overton Window of public discourse in order to eradicate all rightist voices entirely: be they free market capitalist voices, or nationalist-populist ones…If they really cared about political freedom, the Constitution, and freedom of speech in the United States, we’d already have our own serious social network to contend with the liberal establishment. Instead, our ideas are being silenced en masse, and on repeat.”
Kassam further asserted that mega rich Republic donors pouring money into political campaigns will become increasingly futile.
“As the digital public square takes over as the number one source for the majority of people’s information, the Big Tech tyrants will render their dollars meaningless via the stifling of speech.”
. [Featured image credit: David Mark/Pixabay]
