Not a Mixed Message

Amazon insists it’s only censoring violent speech, and claimed that when it tossed Parler off its AWS cloud hosting facility, thereby denying (as Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s MFWIC, knew full well at the time) Parler and all of its primarily conservative participants any voice on the Internet.

Just the News says that with the tossing of sites like Parler while hosting other sites like Twitter, Amazon is sending “mixed signals.”

Here are some tweets that still are up on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, that’s now on Amazon’s AWS cloud hosting facility:

Actor and liberal activist George Takei on Sunday referred favorably to Paul’s assault in a tweet in which he wrote: “Admit it. These days we all sort of wish we had been Rand Paul’s neighbor.”
Podcaster Amy Westervelt, meanwhile, wrote: “Where is Rand Paul’s neighbor when you need him.”
Author Brandon Snider tweeted in favor of a “GoFundMe for Rand Paul’s neighbor to finish the job.”
Author Mark Sarvas wrote that Paul’s neighbor should “kick his racist ass again.”

JtN is misapprehending the situation. Amazon is not sending any mixed signals at all; Bezos’ message is quite clear: Conservatives have nothing to say and no voice to say it as far as he’s concerned. He freely allows violent messages on his facility—so long as they’re spoken by the “right” persons.

Alphabet Strikes Again

Alphabet, through its wholly-owned Google’s wholly-owned YouTube, has censored The Epoch Times, barring the news outlet from its YouTube channel and expelling it from YouTube’s Partner Program, through which The Epoch Times monetized much of its output.

Alphabet claims the news outlet violated its subsidiary’s subsidiary’s “Community Guidelines.” Its YouTube spokesman said,

All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines, and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.

The spokesman declined to say how the guidelines had been violated, or what output from The Epoch Times had been deemed wanting.

Of course, if Alphabet got specific, it would have to explain its censorship.

Censorship

Jack Dorsey is expanding his censorship function, this time under the guise of something he’s euphemistically calling “Birdwatch.”

The project, which is called Birdwatch, will be available to users on a first-come, first-served basis. It will allow users to write notes that provide context to tweets they believe require additional information to be digested by the public responsibly.

First come, first served—so no pretense of an actual cross-section of the speaking or political spectrums. And birders’ definition of “public responsibility,” not posters’ or readers’ definition(s). Can’t have that.

Then there’s Keith Coleman, Twitter Vice President Product:

Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable[.]

Never mind that, for the foreseeable future, “Birdwatch” will exist separately from the Twitter timeline so that Twitter users won’t be able to see this…contextualizing…commentary.

Here’s the kicker, though:

“Birdwatch” users will be allowed to rate the notes of other Birdwatch users, an attempt to prevent bad-faith individuals from undermining the goal of the system.

Gotta keep those censors contextualizers contextualizing from the right slant, after all.

The Unimpressed Congresswoman

…is unimpressed. Recall that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) was censored by Jack Dorsey and his Twitter company by his shutting down her account for 12 hours for tweets of which Dorsey disapproved and which Dorsey considered us ordinary Americans too stupid and too weak of character to be able to process properly.

Now that she’s back on the air (until Dorsey melts again), she expressed her disdain for Dorsey’s censorship and especially for his and his cronies’ arrogance (summarized by Newsmax below).

Contrary to how highly you think of yourself and your moral platitude, you are not the judge of humanity. God is. And you and the rest of your pals from the Silicon Valley Cartel are not God. Difficult for you to grasp I know, however it’s the truth. The tweets that you deem ‘appropriate’ and ‘safe’ and ‘true,’ compared to tweets you deem ‘inciting violence’ and ‘spreading false information’ and ‘claims of election fraud is disputed’ are so many times, in the opinion of many, quit hypocritical and false.

What she said.

More More Censorship of Conservatives

And now it’s not even particularly conservative voices, it’s the center-right voices of Newsmax TV and OANN that the Left is desperate to shut up.

Oliver Darcy, CNN Senior Media Reporter:

[I]t was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth: That he lost an honest and fair election[.]

Certainly lies according to that which may not be questioned, CNN. There were, actually, quite a breathtaking number of election irregularities in that election. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, absent those irregularities, but that’s beside the point. Discussions, debates, regarding those irregularities and the election itself are entirely proper.

And Alex Stamos, ex- of Facebook and now an occasional CNN contributor, on a CNN television show:

We are going to have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem. These companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.

Listen to what passes for logic in that. Freedom of speech appears to be confined to the OANN and Newsmax bathrooms, since they’re not to be allowed to speak in public. Neither are pipelines like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, “and such” allowed actually to be pipelines—they are to be required to censor what us ordinary Americans are to be allowed to hear.

Here’s Darcy again:

Just a reminder that neither @Verizon, @ATT, nor @comcast have answered any questions about why they beam channels like OAN [sic] & Newsmax into millions of homes. Do they have any second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election denialism content? They won’t say.

Neither are any of these carriers required to say. Aside from the lack of obligation to answer the inquisition, there’s no need: the foolishness of Darcy’s characterization is its own answer.

If the timid ones of CNN were able to form coherent arguments with which to counter the concerns, surely those so-smart ones would do so. Instead, they cower behind the shield of censorship. So long as its their own words that aren’t censored.

RTWT. The stuff CNN and its cronies are pushing isn’t merely disgusting, it’s a deliberate assault on American liberties, a careful attempt to destroy one of our core values, the stuff that makes America America.