Hello to all visiting FR today and Happy Monday! As it is Monday, as always, today’s post is by Stephen Hall. Thanks, Stephen!
Everyone lately has been commenting on the concerted effort by leftist new-media corporations targeting certain accounts for sometimes outright censorship, demonization, account incarceration, even stealth or shadow banning.
Recently, these companies colluded to target some specific individuals including Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes, accompanied with excuses such as Mr. Jones was peddling fake news and labeling Mr. McInnes as an Alt-Right hate-monger.
It is immaterial and irrelevant for this discussion whether those excuses are true or false, all that matters is that big, financially powerful corporations have made it their concerted effort to limit or remove people from their platforms based on their employees’ opinions of the quality and/or veracity of their content.
Under normal circumstances this would not raise an eyebrow, however these particular companies have built their entire business model upon the notion of creating an open platform for the free expression of ideas in their respective formats. They were designed and promoted as a public soapbox for the average person to express their opinions and ideas unfiltered by the big media networks.
This promise of the free exchange of ideas garnered a lot of attention, and, while it has promoted within the culture an unhealthy narcissism, built the careers of heretofore unknown and obscure people based on the popularity of their content funded through direct advertising by other companies to their audience.
And then they weren’t.
Almost overnight these corporations built upon the free exchange of ideas, became the very corporate media gatekeepers they pretended their businesses were built to bypass for more direct interpersonal contact with the viewers, and a direct and immediate feedback unavailable to the big media competitors.
Having data-mined users’ personal information to market and sell to advertisers, the companies have achieved not merely profits but attained virtual monopolies for the respective forums they have created.
The Social Justice Warriors, and on Twitter the Social Justice Celebrities commonly identified by their blue checkmarks, found it offensive that people would contradict their opinions or be so rude as to demonstrate how their known facts were actually wrong, or would be so gauche as to actually state an opinion different from theirs cried out in dispair for a way to block or un-friend such people.
Not content to merely not listen to such literally disagreeable opinions, they started creating lists of people to share amongst their fellow leftist to warn them of the existence of those vile diverse opinion holders.
This is not to say that such a feature is not an appropriate technological feature, as I personally will readily block those who waste my time with vulgarities and insults, and anyone should in order to maintain a decent level of decorum because I’m told challenging them to a rapier duel has fallen somewhat out of fashion.
People, mostly conservatives, suddenly found themselves preemptively blocked by people with whom they had never met, never texted, or ever had any form contact. They found themselves “listed”.
While this might have been an amusing isolation of such sensitive souls into their own little leftist bubbles and echo chambers, which tends to harm no one but themselves and provides little but derisive chuckling from those so blocked, it has come to be employed as a type of ideological weapon by those corporate entities.
The recent changes to computer algorithms created to limit the exposure of certain people who are deemed by the computer subroutine to be offensive, less than stellar quality participants in this otherwise ostensibly public forum tie a user’s visibility to that said blocking feature.
Thus turning those lists of people collectively blocked by large segments of the user populace as self-justification for shadow-banning those opinions the most sensitive among the users deem offensive.
On a similar note, other platforms like YouTube, have chosen to create algorithms which step between the content producer and the advertisers based upon their employees’ political ideology to attack their very livelihoods.
The idea that these technological oligarchs would use their position to advance their own agenda is ultimately, and obviously, self defeating. One needs only look at the beating that the stock of certain companies, namely Facebook and Twitter took upon the public revelation that their user subscriptions dramatically declined as the result of such practices.
Before Facebook there was MySpace, and no one seriously believed that Facebook would ever gain a sufficient following to overtake the user subscription lead held by MySpace. An internet platform is only as valuable as its advertising potential based upon its content viewers and subscribers.
However, it is not merely this self-destructive show of force by alternate media platforms which serves as the topic of this post, but the general tendency of modern society to cater to the emotionally fragile perpetually offended, the “snowflakes”.
(And I am here speaking of the actual “snowflakes” not those who get mis-labeled as “snowflakes” because said person was rightfully offended by a direct insult against their person, as it has become the practice of attempting to turn the insult of “snowflake” against anyone who dares be offended.)
We now have a society which has become so frightened and skittish of any negative publicity that internet outrage against an offensive comment is oft sufficient to cause that person’s employer to discharge them from their service.
The outrage of the Twitter Mob has become a real phenomena in today’s society. Some people are insulting. Some people are outright offensive. Some people are depraved perverts. However, the offensive, insulting, or perverse comments a person of olde may have discussed with his fellows once upon a time seldom came back to haunt him in his occupation.
There was a time when an employer would have looked at someone complaining to them about a comment their servant made on their own time and away from work and responded with, “What the hell would I care what they said or did if it doesn’t pertain to their job? Get the hell out of my office you meddlesome lout! You nattering, gossiping olde busybody!”
Ah, those were more genteel times. Well, perhaps not genteel, but in many ways more pleasant.
We have created a monstrous society which has empowered the “snowflake”, the perpetual state of the ubiquitously offended, while at the same time emasculated those employers who would have been callously indifferent to the wailing, crying, and gnashing of teeth from those annoying, self-righteous finger-pointers.
There is an olde saying, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, and God help us when they do for the meek will become absolute tyrants when they come to power.” (Or something to that effect.) When a toddler throws a tantrum, the worst thing you can do is to give into them; which is exactly what our society has done with our adult “snowflakes” throwing tantrums.
