De-platforming and narrative control on social media

In this episode, we talk about YouTube’s new policy regarding termination of accounts and how the platform is quickly losing its original appeal. We also touch on Facebook’s Atlantic Council partnership, Facebook throttling mentions of Minds.com and the de-platforming of Daniel McAdams.

YouTube has a new policy regarding termination of accounts. The key point is that “YouTube may terminate your access if they believe, in their sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable”. In other words, if YouTube thinks your budding new channel doesn’t have legs, they can cut you off entirely. If they apply the policy, or when they do, this policy is going to make YouTube a lot of enemies.

The inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast popped out during her performance. The founder noticed that you could not easily find video clips of this online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site. It was in large part, as a way to find obscure and edgy content online — to circumvent the existing media machinery. 

Since then, YouTube has lost a lot of that original essence, the original essence being giving everyone their own voice and content being freely available in a simple free speech manner. It used to be YouTube, not CNN-tube, not MSNBC-tube, Youtube. Today, it’s becoming more like regular, legacy, old school TV online. It’s curated, airbrushed and streamlined content that’s safe and palatable for the generic masses. I’ve mentioned this before, but the whole corporate TV-online direction shows such a lack of vision on the part of YouTube.

Meanwhile, Facebook have not been as keen on the outright de-platforming as of late, but they are certainly on the censorship bandwagon. Facebook announced last year it was working closely with the neoconservative think tank, The Atlantic Council (which is largely funded by Saudi Arabia, Israel and various weapons manufacturers) to fight foreign “fake news”. Good luck with that!  What could go wrong when these people get to influence what 2 billion people see in their news feed? When an organization like the Atlantic Council is controlling the information flow on the largest social media platform in the world, that is authoritarian censorship on a global level.

Finally, and most recently, Twitter just banned Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute, supposedly for calling Sean Hannity a retard. Not a nice thing to say, but let’s be honest, that word is used all the time by others, but somehow that alone was enough to get McAdams kicked off. It’s obvious that the rules are applied arbitrarily, when it’s convenient for the wokesters over at Twitter. 

We can see where this is going. If you are on the ‘wrong’ side of any issue, you could raise the ire of the wokester police and you could be in danger of being deplatformed. So far, this is only affecting persons and pages with larger followings, but this could change. What we are seeing play out in the tech space is about control, controlling whatever narrative that the corporate executives happen to agree with. So, think long and hard about which platforms you want to make use of, and which ones you are dependent on. As a business, diversify, and as a consumer vote with your feet — or rather your thumbs.

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