The Silicon Valley inquisition gathers pace

A number of independent online commentators have been blacklisted by technology giants for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

Scott Bicheno

December 11, 2018

3 Min Read
The Silicon Valley inquisition gathers pace

A number of independent online commentators have been blacklisted by technology giants for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

The past few weeks have seen another round of purging, by online platform or financial service providers, of content creators who rely on the internet for a living. The reasons for doing so are varied but usually default to some kind of transgression of their terms and conditions of use. However these Ts and Cs tend to be vaguely worded and appear to be selectively enforced, leading to fears that these decisions have been driven as much by subjective ideology as any exceptional misbehaviour on the part of creators.

If there is an ideological bias it would appear to be against those commentators that are advocates of freedom of speech and unfettered dialogue. On the other side of the fence you have those who are concerned with concepts such as ‘hate speech’, which seek to ensure nothing that is deemed ‘offensive’ should be tolerated in the public domain.

Those latter two terms are ill-defined and thus subject to a wide range of interpretation, which means rules that rely on them will, by definition, be subjectively enforced. In spite of that there is growing evidence that Silicon Valley companies are unanimous in their assessments of who should and shouldn’t be banned from all of their public platforms.

We have previously written about the coordinated banning of InfoWars from pretty much all internet publication channels and a subsequent purge of ‘inauthentic activity’ from social media. Now we can add commentator Gavin McInnes to the list of people apparently banned from all public internet platforms and, most worryingly of all, the removal of popular YouTuber Sargon of Akkad from micro-funding platform Patreon.

The internet, social media and especially YouTube have revolutionised the way in which regular punters get access to information, commentary and discussion. Free from the constraints imposed on broadcast TV, YouTubers have heralded a new era of on-demand, unfettered, user-generated content that has rapidly superseded TV as the viewing platform of choice.

Their primary source of income has traditionally been the core internet model: monetizing traffic via serving ads. But YouTube has been removing ads from any videos that have even the slightest chance of upsetting any of its advertisers for some time, forcing creators to call for direct funding from their audience to compensate.

The best-known micro-funding service is Patreon, which is where many YouTubers send their audience if they want to pay for their content. Any decision by Patreon to ban its users can therefore have massive implications for the career and income of the recipient of the ban. Sargon is thought to have had revenues from Patreon alone in excess of £100,000 per year, a revenue stream that has been unilaterally cut off without even a warning, it seems.

Every time an internet company moves against a popular internet figure there is inevitably outcry on both sides of the matter. Prominent advocates of free speech such as Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin have tweeted their support for Sargon, while many media are actively celebrating the punishing or outright removal from the internet of people they don’t like.

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The age-old debate concerning the optimal balance between safety and freedom is being won, on the internet at least, by those biased in favour of the former. The leaders of they key companies in that space are in a difficult position regarding censorship of their platforms but they seem to be basing their decisions on fear of the online mob rather than the rational, objective enforcement of universal rules. This isn’t a new phenomenon but it seems to be rapidly getting worse.

To finish here’s YouTuber and independent journalist Tim Pool giving his perspective while he still can.

 

About the Author

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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