Big Tech Accelerates Politicized Purge As Biden Issues “Special Plea”
YouTube takes down Bongino, DirecTV To Drop OANN, while a pressure campaign is waged against Joe Rogan’s Spotify program
Joe “I am the Democratic Party” Biden issued a “special plea” to social media companies to “please deal with the misinformation and disinformation [about COVID] that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”
The clip is bizarre in many ways, not the least of which is the repeated references to the military stepping up juxtaposed against his “special plea” for Big Tech censorship (who are, apparently, in doddering Joe’s estimation not yet doing enough to censor ‘wrongthink’).
Watch:
Biden is Commander in Chief of the United States military per the Constitution. He has zero Constitutional authority over social media companies, yet the implication seems clear here: Big Tech needs to step up as the military has done to help fight against “one of the most formidable enemies America has ever faced.”
Stop laughing. He is serious. And that is horrifying.
Big Tech, never one to back down from Biden’s leftist government “pleas,” has responded by going to war with conservatives, purging them from social and alternative media just as the military under political hack Lloyd Austin is purging ‘wrongthink’ from its ranks.
YouTube responds to Biden’s “special plea”:
When the leader of the majority party in Washington, DC, issues a demand, the largest corporations listen.
Again: so much of the censorship from Google and other tech monopolies is done not on their own accord but under pressure and threats from Democratic Party leaders. pic.twitter.com/YYA16mgJYj
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 15, 2022
[FS edit: LI reader PasadenaPhil supplied this link to Bongino’s response, a chef’s kiss “they can kiss my a**” because I saw this coming and am prepared. Stay tuned.]
AT&T-owned DirecTV responds to Biden’s “special plea”:
This will damn near cripple One America News. DirecTV provided the vast majority of their television viewer base. https://t.co/XIfRnPZG8U
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 15, 2022
A conglomerate of activist “scientists” urge Spotify to respond to Biden’s “special plea”:
270 health experts to Spotify: Joe Rogan's Covid misinformation is 'a sociological issue of devastating proportions' https://t.co/ncxCTaVCkh
— CNBC International (@CNBCi) January 14, 2022
I’ll leave you with this observation by Glenn Greenwald (read his below linked substack piece):
Ever since they took over the White House and Congress, Democrats have bee explicitly threatening Silicon Valley monopolies to censor more or face legal and regulatory reprisals.
At some point, the large body of 1st Amendment law on this will be tested:https://t.co/KBMZpFiSzL
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 15, 2022
I’d like to share Greenwald’s optimism here, but it may be difficult to prove coercion given that Big Tech has been enthusiastically and willfully purging, shadow banning, and otherwise suppressing rightthink reach for years now.
Based on this presidential “special plea” and previous WH statements about the need for social media to do the job government cannot, there may be a means to build a case for collusion between the Biden government and Big Tech to circumvent the First Amendment rights of Americans (as the Supremes recently noted was done with the now-defunct OSHA vaccine mandate).
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Trumps Truth platforms need to be really really good and quickly put up
I am so excited to see what this will be. I hope it’s the answer, or at least part of the answer. Don’t be the first to sign up, though, it will be hacked within 48 hours (again). Once it’s stable, I will definitely join!
We may not get there – from Merrick Garland to Biden: these people are talking like psychopaths.
Believe what they are saying.
I’m 100% with Joe. We need to throttle back ALL the misinformation and disinformation that is out there. Examples:
1) Trans “women” are women
2) America is systemically racist
3) $50T = $0
4) COVID couldn’t possibly have come from the Wuhan lab.
5) America’s greatest terrorist threat is right-wingers.
6) “I will shut down the virus.”
7) Angry parents are domestic terrorists.
8) The filibuster is racist.
9) We will take everybody out of Afghanistan who wants to leave.
10) Voter ID laws are a threat to democracy.
11) Schools are not teaching or using CRT.
12) The border is secure.
And if it means we have to stop covering Joe, Kamala, Nancy, Chuckie, Stacey, Janet, Merrick, and Jen completely, we’re willing to make that sacrifice.
What Biden is doing (at the behest of his puppetmaster Susan Rice) is egging-on the right into what she hopes is violence, from which to use the resources of our corrupted government and our Austin-Miley military to physically attack patriotic Americans.
One more to agree with, Let’s Go Brandon !
“talking like psychopaths”
more like they are psychopaths , who deserve to locked up and otherwise treated just like Jan 6t people.
It won’t be. The reality is that it takes billions of dollars to make a compelling social media platform. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat…these companies all lost money for years before they finally turned a profit. Some still aren’t profitable. What’s also problematic is from an advertising standpoint, it’s going to be that much more difficult to thrive in that tech space when you’re perceived – correctly or incorrectly – as a platform catering to the ‘far right.’
Correct, I’ve been saying similar things here for a long time. I’ve built “web-scale” software for a living now for 20+ years. I know how expensive, time-consuming and difficult it is just to get a product built in a way that is robust, scalable, secure, etc. And it will be orders of magnitude MORE difficult, expensive and time-consuming if you have to do it without leveraging any of the “platforms” which dominate the space but are ideologically aligned with the left.
Then there is the fact that “just because you built it, they may not come.” And as you say, the long-knives will be out to try to kill it before it gets off the ground. The odds are stacked against him. Of course, he thrives in that environment; I wish him luck.
” And it will be orders of magnitude MORE difficult, expensive and time-consuming if you have to do it without leveraging any of the “platforms” which dominate the space but are ideologically aligned with the left.”
This is precisely the “IBM PC BIOS” problem. Motivated people can and have solved it.
“What’s also problematic is from an advertising standpoint”
Only if the advertiser is a commie or a squish.
Do you know how many industries want to advertise online and who are also being banned?
Trump could survive on the gun and gun accessory industry alone.
And then, of course, there are all the “nutritional supplements” who get promoted by every right-wing podcaster in the world.
What’s Big Tobacco doing these days?
And don’t you need more pillows?
The marketing budget for the entire gun and ammunition industry wouldn’t cover the monthly burn rate (perhaps not even the weekly burn rate) that Twitter endured the first five years of its existence. If you look at the advertising ranking in trade publications, there’s not a single gun manufacturer in the top 1k advertisers in the ‘pure play internet’ space (that’s the industry term for web advertising).
In terms of gun retailers, the only company in the top 500 national advertisers is Walmart (as Dicks Sporting Goods is exiting the firearm sales business). When’s the last time you saw a Walmart ad on Fox News. They simply do not sponsor politically-oriented content.
Again, too many conservatives just don’t have a rational understanding of the costs of launching a new social media platform or the problem that conservative-oriented content creators have in finding advertisers. Tucker Carslon is the biggest non-sporting, prime-time program on cable today. And yet, he doesn’t attract a single advertiser in the top 1K.
All those platforms started small and grew. We are not talking just far right clientele, we are talking about everyone right of Marxists as potential clients.
It will be a total disappointment. Nothing will come of it. Total flop.
And we have to stop patronizing or doing business with the enemies of true Democracy.
Their bubble only swells in population centers. It bursts in the wide open spaces.
They say only the government can censor someone, but it seems that de facto agents of that government can be censors as well.
Time to dump it all, if you have not already.
Fake news, socialist media. All anti American.
True, but you are forgetting that literally everything the radical commie left touches turns to ash. They control the institutions, yay! We are now graduating illiterate (i.e. cannot construct a sentence, much less tell you its parts) people who are the cream of the American crop. And it is humiliating.
Harvard graduates who, no matter their major, know more about DIE and social/environmental/blah, blah blah justice than they do about their actual field. Woots, Harvard degrees for all; we have NO standards at all! We’re equity incarnate! All illiterate lefties loons duly accepted. Except white males, and even white females, they are so evil and stuff. Everyone is a Harvard grad! So hirable . . . if you need someone to smear their own feces on a protest sign. Otherwise, pretty useless since they know nothing, can do nothing, and are worth nothing.
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the left is that they think if they completely destroy this thing, it won’t affect any other thing. Woohoo! Let’s just make crime penalty-free! No more crime! It’s like magic! Or gee, let’s defund the police since those shiny white neighborhoods don’t really have a heavy law enforcement presence. That MUST mean that less police means safer neighborhoods.
Yes, these are stupid, stupid, stupid people who can’t rub two sticks together and get a clue. And we do not have to indulge their lunacy. Ever.
” And we do not have to indulge their lunacy….”
We seem to be indulging their violence, which is going to get worse and worse.
YouTube suspended Dan Bongino today and here is his response:
https://slaynews.com/news/dan-bongino-fires-back-at-youtube-after-suspension-tells-them-to-kiss-my-a/
He has also been in a fight with Westwood One over their vaccine mandate where, although he is vaxxed, he has refused to fire any of his staff. He taunts them almost daily daring them to fire him and they haven’t.
Bongino has almost 900,000 followers on Facebook, his Fox News Show is also huge as are his other haunts on Rumble and elsewhere. Between Bongino, Joe Rogan (averaging over 11 million daily views and growing), and TimCast, these guys are bigger than the networks. This could be the big trigger for the exodus out of these shitholes.
With YouTube, I doubt they can afford it. They have been cutting payouts to content providers as it is. Should the conservative people leave en masse, it is likely that this will become “a thing” and gain momentum across the board. Keep in mind that the new platform being created by Bongino and friends plus Trump’s new platform will be uncensored.
The online leftisphere is about to go the way of CNN. Just an annoying empty echo chamber of annoying people.
Good comment, and thanks for the Dan Bongino response, I’m including it in my post. 🙂
It will be interesting to see what happens with the radio show. Bongino only has part of the Rush network. I think it was divided and assigned into 8? blocks. It would be interesting to know how much of Rush’s audience they held on to. If they all stick together to stay or leave at once, they have life or death clout over Westwood One There is nothing out there on radio that comes even close to matching them.
But there is no negotiating with the likes of Google, Facebook, WaPo and the rest. The Masters of the Universe that own them are about control. Period. It’s not a business for profit but a means of control. They don’t care about anybody but themselves. Now that they are about to lose their monopoly, they will have control to a rapidly shrinking audience. They risk becoming yet another CNN where no one seems to mind that they have lost as much as 90% of their audience. Why would even whack-job liberals stay if trolls are the only audience?
If you listen to Bongino, he is always taunting and mocking the libs. It’s a symbiotic relationship just as it was with Trump and the MSM. When Trump lost, they lost their audiences. The left needs victims to attack and now the victims are creating their own platforms where the debate will be lively and no one gets cancelled for having the wrong opinion. So if they really want a fight, they will have to follow the audience where they will be reminded what it was like before just disagreeing with them got us booted out of the discussion.
New ball game. The public debate forum is being “unrigged” and we will eat them alive with our sense of humor alone.
I think one thing that hamstrings conservatives in this conversation is a lack of understanding about how media and tech companies get paid and why tech companies don’t care if conservative flee their platforms. Ultimately, it’s not about viewers…it’s about payers. A platform can have a billion viewers, but if blue-chip advertisers aren’t willing to buy ads on the platform, it’s irrelevant. YouTube’s ad revenue is gigantic, $7B last year alone. Do they care if Bongino goes away? Of course not. Why? Because the kinds of advertisers that will pay a premium rate wouldn’t touch Bongino’s show with a 10′ poll. That’s the reality. So, when they demonitize him, it’s costing them – in the grand scale of things – absolutely nothing.
There’s a reason why Tucker Carlon’s advertisers include pillow makers and gold brokers while the advertisers on his two competitors’ show in the same time slot – that he crushes every night – count GM, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Apple etc, etc as advertisers.
When you say ‘The online leftisphere is about to go the way of CNN..’ it’s not. Why? For the same reason CNN isn’t going away even though it’s lost a MASSIVE amount of viewers. Blue-chip companies will still advertise on CNN. The revenue streams that CNN/MSNBC as well as YouTube and the other tech companies have built for themselves simply aren’t predicated on the same kinds viewership models that controlled broadcast television during the 20th century.
You are SO wrong. Believe me, they care how many people are watching. That is the WHOLE point of communications AND advertising. Advertisers are NOT going to pay for ads only to have them bounce off of trees and buildings. Who cares if THEY don’t go away? There BUSINESS is gone! They become zombies propped up by stupid money. Harmless idiots.
Right. These companies may pay for a time but eventually these companies are going to start asking why they are paying so much money for nothing. Eventually advertisers on CNN, if they are not already, are going to start demanding to pay less or even stop advertising. They pay so people can see their stuff. If no one is watching why pay?
Somehow we’ve got to get everyone on the right to act as a group and drop YouTube at the same time. It would send shock-waves through Google.
“There’s a reason why Tucker Carlon’s advertisers include pillow makers and gold brokers while the advertisers on his two competitors’ show in the same time slot – that he crushes every night – count GM, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Apple etc, etc as advertisers.”
Yeah, even to a ten-year-old, that statement doesn’t sound sustainable. I mean, it’s true, I’m not disputing that. But it clearly shows that the mainstream advertisers are going to be having big trouble down the line. Some capitalist will break ranks to buy the rope he needs to hang his competitors.
I think the big corporate advertisers are afraid of the boycotts that have been largely driven by some pretty powerful public employee and union funds. That’ part of the story that doesn’t get a lot of press.
Be that as it may, keep in mind It advertising dollars are NOT the primary income stream for cable nets. Instead, they make the majority of their money from carriage fees, the fees that satellite and cable providers pay to the networks. Yes, CNN makes about a third less money in ad revenue than FNC even with their advantage with blue chip advertisers. BUT, they make it up on the carriage fees through a variety of ways, but mostly by leveraging their entire product offering as a package. This is why Jeff Zucker has been promoted (he now is responsible for CNN, Turner Sports and all the internet properties (streaming). Even though he’s run CNN into the ground from a viewership standpoint while at the same time, he’s improved profitability for the entire entire company.
As I said to someone else, it’s difficult to understand exactly what’s happening in the space unless you really understand how the revenue is generated. The Nielsen ratings model that everyone is so familiar with is only a part of the entire puzzle and ultimately, not a super important part. If it were, Zucker would have been fired years ago.
Don’t forget that it was the previous Democrat administration that used regulators to pressure banks to stop doing business with firearm manufacturers and others engaged in absolutely legitimate and legal, but disfavored business. It should come as no surprise that this administration would attempt to co-opt tech oligarchies into suppressing dissent.
They (the Democrat Socialists) spent four years warning that Trump’s administration would be an authoritarian one but theirs is the one that delivered on that particularly dubious promise.
Only a matter of time before banks and insurance are pressured to drop the alt-media sites, just as they did to Trump. Hard to run a business without liability insurance and corporate bank accounts.
If MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and Amex join together and order their payment processors to cut off Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, and so forth how do they get paid, or pay their vendors?
The States have a role to play and plenty of pressure to bring to bear. Leverage State Pension funds, bond business, State DDA and State credit accounts to counter authoritarian financial services providers to resist censorship, BDS, CRT/Equity among other things.
Use the leverage of State contracts and for financial services use State charters. The beauty of this is that we don’t want these institutions to do anything, instead we want them to refrain from putting their their thumb on the scale. That is a far less objectionable position than requiring an action.
Use THIER rules against them. (1) Anti-trust action – bust them up; (2) regulate them into utility status and force open access, (3) wealth tax them – they are using their money for neo-fascistic purposes – they cannot be responsible with it so just take it away, – 99% of everything to include what they have stuffed away in “charitable trusts” which they actually control for tall their vanity projects, AOC is right, no one needs more than $1 billion dollars (at least not yet until the end of the Biden administration then we all may well need it), (4) make them give their non-management and especially manual labor employees better pay so they accumulate less.
Go full socialist on them. They have been advocating this crap. Make them walk the walk.
Go all Schwab on them – tell them THEY will own nothing, and we do not give a crap if they are happy.
Stop Oligarchy now!
BSR
As a parallel track at the Federal level sure. Those of us on the populist right can work with the Bernie Bro wing of the left to advance the ball on trust busting and on breaking monopoly business. Assuming that they are willing to work with us that is, instead of grandstand….
Apparently, Heartland Financial – a bank in MN, I believe – is closing all of Mike Lindell’s accounts, business, personal and even his charity accounts.
The gun industry has already solved that for you. During the last Chokepoint, they get ambitious and rolled their own versions of some of these services (solution sound familiar)? I’m sure they’ll be happy to welcome Rumble, etc. to their customer base. Sounds like all they need to do to make that happen is to advertise on Tucker Carlson.
Insurance is state by state. How many insurance companies want to be told “You like being able to sell insurance in Texas? Then you can provide the same insurance offerings to every business headquartered here.”
Uhhh, that would be you, Joe.
We’re going to see it’s ReichFuhrer Merrick Garland, on strings handled by Susan Rice.
Good to see Susan Rice’s name again. She and her cohorts have been silently slithering around in the shadows for the past year. She and they, need to be exposed. Biden is a doddering old fool, they are a metastisizing cancer.
This certainly is Obama’s third term.
Biden’s will be the first presidential funeral televised with a laugh track.
We’re going need a fleet of firefighting helicopters over Arlington to accommodate all the people who intend to piss on Joe’s grave.
(as the Supremes recently noted was done with the now-defunct OSHA vaccine mandate).
————————————
Is that really as solid as we’d like to believe? Didn’t the supreme idiots basically say if congress mandated osha to enforce the shot then all would be fine?
And how did those dipschiffs get a majority to agree that medical people have to take the shot?
Were they all being led by kagan in some cult belief she’s smarter than a kumquat?
She may not be smarter than a kumquat, but these same idiots are running our military – and turning our soldiers against us.
Yes, if congress had explicitly given OSHA that power then the regs would be valid. The whole challenge was on the grounds that it doesn’t have the power.
The difference in the medical workers’ case is simply that the relevant statute does give the HHS secretary the power to make this regulation.
It’s as simple as that. Two different statutes with different language, two distinct agencies, two different regulations, so why is it at all surprising that the results would be different?
The challenge for the right is that slow Joe and Psaki are right. Although OSHA does not have the power to “madate” the vaccine, they are still free to use heavy handed tacttics to obtain “voluntary” compliance.
Yes. They can do “routine” inspections of businesses and ask them about vaccine compliance, and then issue citations for other mundane violations like hazardous waste, etc..
As this thread well illustrates, the rate that Slow Joe’s Corporate donors immediately capitulate to his decrees and proclamations, regardless of constitutionality, the difference between a “vaccine mandate” and sweeping private corporation “voluntary” mandates may be reduced to a matter of semantics.
Two problems. First we assume that the corporations who choose to proceed with their own ‘voluntary’ mandate will do so when:
1. They don’t have a Fed mandate to hide behind
2. They don’t have liability protection for ill effects
Secondly we assume that the current unvax employees will automatically decide to get the jab. That’s not likely for the bulk of these employees, IMO. This also assumes that the vax holdouts are not essential or key employees whose loss the corporations will feel in productivity.
While you are correct that a company can tell it’s employees to get a jab or loose a job, what happens next is far from certain.
But is the media and corporations following the administration wishes or administration making statements according to corporations and media wishes?
The mailed fist descendeth.
This will not end well.
Glen Greenwald is correct. At some point the panicky Covid Karens in the Admin are going to be reminded of the pesky Constitution. The govt cannot outsource actions that are unconstitutional in order to achieve it’s policy goals. That’s pretty basic stuff. Creating a new precedent which overturns this would have far reaching consequences. As with their decision to blow up the judicial filibuster, any short term convenience would create longer term consequences they will not enjoy. IMO, I doubt that there is a SCOTUS majority to stomach this course.
This the push to prevent losing power. When you reduce every other party to permanent minority then they always will control the future. The USSR collapsed in great part from outside pressure which there wouldn’t be anymore. China would see to it that the Dems would stay in poiwer.
This making them agents of the government is arguable at best.
What we need to do is fully use regulations that already exist, use state legislatures to our advantage and next opportunity legislate regulations for big tech.
They are common carriers and the public sphere. The term “platform” was created just for them as a gigantic government handout (and what government gives it could take away). There is no argument for phones being public utilities and social media not being utilities. I really don’t care if the free market manages to find a solution to big tech market dominance in 150 years, we need solutions now and if you think George Washington or Thomas Jefferson wanted all speech in this country to be up to a tiny clique of leftist billionaires I want some of what your smoking.
“There is no argument for phones being public utilities and social media not being utilities.”
When the government wants Lester Maddox’s lunch counter to be a public accommodation, poof — it’s a public accommodation.
Twitter and Facebook aren’t, only because the government prefers that they’re not.
Bongino does it better, but Stallone did it first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rVQGT01Kzg
Biden has extremely low poll ratings DESPITE all of the legacy media and the social media companies covering for him the best they can.
Imagine if a glimpse of the reality of Joe Biden (influence peddling etc. w/ Hunter?) actually made it to the majority of Americans. Can poll numbers go below zero?
Those secure in the soundness of their science demand debate. Those who aren’t demand censorship. This in an old movie we’ve seen many times before. I just hoped we wouldn’t be seeing sequels in our own country in Century 21. This is where we find ourselves.
Problem for the censors is, they do not have complete control of communications and sources of information in the US. Yet. BTW anyone see the Democrat pols on COVID? 78% want the vax mandate. 59% want the unvaxxed confined at home. 48% support fines and imprisonment for people who question the efficacy of the vaccines. 45% support quarantine camps like Australia’s.
To quote Tim Pool, “Democrats are Nazis, WTF?” Not news to anyone who has been paying attention.