The Establishment's Escalating War on the Intellectual Dark Web
Free speech on the internet is threatened by leftist Big Tech censorship, as everyone by now knows. The following article focuses on what is termed the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW).
The article describes the IDW and then identifies a significant collection of contributors to the IDW. Indeed, it practically serves as a reference guide to the IDW.
The article then discusses: Who on the IDW Has Been Suppressed, and How Is That Done? The arthcle then asks: What Sort of 22nd Century Will We Give Our Children? Indeed, that's a primary concern of most of us in the immigration reform / immigration sanity movement. Excerpts from the article follow:
The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web, by Edward Ring, American Greatness, April 6, 2019. An excellent article on how free speech is being banned and financially deplatformed on the internet. It lists a number of conservative IDW presences and describes how they are being disappeared:
...The intellectual dark web, such as it is, is indeed a collection of politically incorrect websites, videos, podcasts, and the personalities who fill them with content... the intellectual dark web is not immune to shadowbans, deboosts, detrends, demonetizing, throttling down, or expulsion....
Who are these censors? Not an oppressive government, but instead the private quasi monopolies that control all online communication—the social media and video platforms, the providers of membership services, and the payment processors....
The first line of attack is on the social media platforms. You can have a home website, but people have to find it....
Once the social media platforms determine your content is objectionable, they can throttle down your exposure. In some cases, you may not even know it’s happening, you just have smaller audiences. This is called shadowbanning on Twitter or deboosting on Facebook. The next level of enforcement by social media platforms is to “demonetize” someone, which means they stop sending advertising to the viewers, and the content creator stops getting that revenue. On YouTube this can take the form of merely reducing the number of ads served, or completely eliminating them. The final step, of course, is expulsion, which happens all the time....
These are online services that facilitate content creators acquiring paying supporters or subscribers. These services have nearly the same level of monopoly power as the social media platforms, because a supporter has to have an account with the membership services platform before they can direct funds to any specific content creator. Some of the major membership services platforms out are Patreon, Kickstarter, IndiGoGo, GoFundMe, and, until recently, SubscribeStar....
If a content creator is expelled from one membership service platform, they can’t just pick up the pieces with another one....
The ultimate link in the chain are the online payment processors, of which there are only two, PayPal and Stripe....
The crackdown on internet free speech, especially any free speech that attacks the Left, has been ongoing. Back in 2016 it was clear that, for example, search results were being manipulated, but overall the Right was able to creatively use online media and compete effectively against the Left despite big tech’s left wing bias. That was the last time.
By 2018, biased search results were just one major element of online communications that were weaponized by the Left. Deboosting, demonitizing, and expulsion were now practiced by all the major platforms. With their sights on 2020, the Leftist assault on free speech has now moved into the realm of financial services, with payment processors and banks the new battlefield. The stakes are higher than ever....
The banking system itself is being co-opted by the Left. And even if his new platform accepts cyber currency from his fans, notwithstanding the still limited utility of those “currencies,” the ISPs themselves might at that point step into the act, denying use of the internet itself to proscribed content creators....
The Right needs to form its own activist groups, specifically devoted to aggressively pressuring tech companies and financial institutions to respect the first amendment. Our civilization hangs in the balance.
Learn more about Media Bias, Censorship, and Corporate Political Correctness Run Amuck.