I’m sure you all know about the execrable Protect-Biden stunt Twitter just pulled, so I won’t bothering with rehashing all that and just cut straight to the chase.
But anyways, Joe Biden potentially doing sleazy shit isn’t the point of this post. Because the really Orwellian thing was what came next, when the big soulless social media megacorps tried to squash the story in the most ham fisted way imaginable.
They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.
Supposedly they can’t allow the sharing of a story that makes Biden look bad because the information was “leaked”… except they were gleefully sharing Trump’s leaked tax info last week, and before that Russia Collusion nonsense wasn’t so much a leak as a high pressure lawn sprinkler. That was totally okay.
Of course, prog apologists were quick to dismiss the New York Post as fake news, even though it’s the fourth biggest circulating newspaper in America, and these same sites have zero problem sharing painfully obvious fabricated bullshit from crap sites as long as it agrees with lefty orthodoxy. And even then the Post could be total trash, but that’s still Hunter Biden there smoking crack on camera and influence peddling while talking about getting a cut for Pop. (as in Joe Biden, not Corn Pop, gotta clarify because there’s a lot of guys called Pop in this saga).
That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!
If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.
But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.
That’s real fucking power right there.
Correia gets a bit further into the free-market-good, government-regulation-bad weeds from there, which is perfectly understandable and not really even wrong, as far as it goes. But as Larry also cautions, we’re in truly uncharted waters here. And it would be the worst imaginable folly to allow these evil fascists to get away with what their manipulations because Muh Principles™. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly, for decades now, just where that approach leads. It’s a recipe for defeat, in a war Team Liberty can NOT afford to lose.
I won’t belabor that proposition either, for now at least. Instead, allow me to suggest two social-media alternatives to the heinous, treacherous, and insidious Twitter and Faceberg. You’ll know about Gab already, I’m guessing. I’m actually registered there myself, although not being a 140-character guy I never use the thing. In fact, I’m somewhat pleased with myself for remembering my login and pass just now.
What you may not know about is a Facefap alternative mentioned by one of Correia’s commenters, called MeWe. I went ahead set myself up a page there, although since I always hated Fakebook too and haven’t bothered with it in quite a long while now, who knows how much I’ll use MeWe. But what the hell, if you’re into the social-media thing, do yourself a favor: make the switch to a platform that doesn’t hate your guts, tell all your friends, and help to make the world a better place by undermining the gagalicious Twatter/Facebleccch twin malignancies.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverupdate! The Deep State looks out for its own.
The owner of a Delaware computer repair store where a man he believes was Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop that allegedly contained emails detailing an opportunity for a meeting between former Vice President Joe Biden and a top Burisma executive and other “disturbing” items, told Fox News on Wednesday that he was frightened by what he saw.
The man, John Paul Mac Isaac, said he has a condition that affects his vision and “can’t be 100% sure” it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer for repair. The Wilmington shop owner said he contacted the FBI out of concern, but declined to specify what he meant.
“I just don’t know what to say, or what I’m allowed to say,” Isaac said. “I know that I saw, I saw stuff. And I was concerned. I was concerned that somebody might want to come looking for this stuff eventually and I wanted it out of my shop.”
In September, he contacted an intermediary about the emails. The intermediary then contacted the FBI.
According to Isaac’s account, the FBI first made a forensic copy of the laptop, then returned weeks later with a subpoena and confiscated it. When he stopped hearing from the FBI, Isaac said he contacted several members of Congress, who did not respond. At that point, his intermediary reached out to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello.
Making his own copy of the hard drive was a smart move on his part. In the Fox interview, Isaac says that he was worried about shadowy figures “coming back” for the laptop—as well he should have been. If I was him, I’d be looking into hiring myself a full-time bodyguard. But will there be a reckoning for the censorious Twin Malignancies and their sleight-of-hand electioneering? Ummm…wellllll, maybe.
The backlash from Republican leaders against the platforms was severe, with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, saying the Twitter CEO would be receiving a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“We have seen Big Tech—we’ve seen Twitter and Facebook—actively interfering in this election in a way that has no precedent in the history of our country,” Cruz said in a statement alongside committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-SC.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on,” Cruz said.
“… Let me be clear: I don’t know if these New York Post stories are true or not,” he continued. “Those are questions Vice President Biden should answer. But Twitter and Facebook and Big Tech billionaires don’t get to censor political speech and actively interfere in the election.”
Oddly enough, Cruz announced this in, umm, a Tweet. So, more hearings and committees and blue-ribbon panels then. What’s that old line about “sound and fury” and what they signify again?
Twitter had severe problems last night and then Trump tweeted out a Babylon Bee story about Twitter Shutting Down It’s Entire Network To Prevent People Seeing Bad News About Biden.
I say it’s a Master Of the Universe Trolling Moment.
There’s more: The head of the FCC announced three days ago he’s going to make some changes (actually he wrote “clarify”, but he’s a Republican) in §230 of the CDA which now protects big tech from doing this kind of shit and also shields them from government action against monopolies.
Now, wouldn’t both of those be sweet as hell?