The mass banning of Alex Jones and InfoWars across the social media spectrum is proof of the pudding when it comes to censorship of conservatives. Not only has Jones been banned from a litany of public platforms without a shred of evidence, the leaders of Big Tech can't even provide pertinent details to explain why they are censoring him. Instead, tech leaders are all falling back on nearly identical statements about how Alex Jones violated their rules with his "hate speech," but not a single example has been provided.
The tech industry has decided to go full force with their Iron Curtain, it seems. There are many questions about the censorship of Alex Jones that Silicon Valley is unable (or perhaps, unwilling) to answer.
Even some left-leaning sites have agreed that the power yielded by Big Tech is a cause for concern.
Breitbart has reached out to the companies involved in an effort to glean more information. Here are the responses they got:
The full reply from YouTube:
All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube. When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.
And from Apple:
Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users. Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinion.
At the time of this reporting, no other companies had replied. Note how their replies are virtually the same: InfoWars is accused of peddling hate speech that violates the companies' policies -- but no reference to what content it was that "violated" their rules is made.
On August 7, InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson confirmed that the Big Tech corporations involved with his mass expulsion from social media had not yet provided examples of specific InfoWars content that violated their terms of service.
In a statement, Facebook stated that the InfoWars content they took down "violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies."
What content did this exactly, however, has not been identified. Further, what constitutes "dehumanizing language" is highly debatable. Feelings are subjective things, and that makes them hard to govern and base policies on. The term "illegal immigrant" is deemed offensive by the Left, for example, even though it's not a racial slur.
Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Congress earlier this year that he himself could not define "hate speech." Yet, Facebook, Google, Apple and most of Big Tech have no problem policing independently minded supporters of freedom like Alex Jones.
The most concerning thing about the silencing of Alex Jones is the simple fact that Jones is only the first. Now that the can of censorship-worms has been opened, who will be next?
See more coverage of biased, left-leaning acts at Censorship.news.
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