The Free Market Has Failed Us

February 8, 2017 Hunter Wallace Social Media 44

I’ve said it all on Twitter.

There is a disconnect between free market ideology and the reality of our experience with “no platforming.” Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google/YouTube and other social media monopolies engage in political censorship. In contrast, the Post Office is uncensored.

You can send anyone who has been banned on Twitter a letter through the US Mail in complete confidence that it won’t be censored. You can call anyone with your Verizon or Sprint cellphone and talk for as long as you want. You can text anyone in the United States as much as you want without censorship. You never have to worry about SJWs “no platforming” you with political censorship by denying you electric service, water, sewer, a mailbox or cell phone service.

Why should social media be any different? I like the Post Office because there is no Jack Dorsey telling me who I can send a letter. There is no Jack Dorsey telling me who I can call on any given day. BTW, “no platforming” is a major problem with PayPal and Patreon as well.

Twitter is looking for a buyer. Congress should buy Twitter and transform it into a free speech public utility. It should guarantee access to everyone without political censorship.

Note: The fact that Media Matters is trying to censor social media to repress all conservative and “rightwing propagandists” should push this issue to the top of our agenda.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

44 Comments

  1. I believe Richard Spencer said Twitter and other social media should be treated as public spaces. If Restaurants have to serve black people and bakeries have to make gay wedding cakes, then Jack Dorsey should not be able to ban dissident views from his public space.

  2. Jack Dorsey and I are both native St. Louisans and of the high school class of 1995 and graduated from high schools in the city of St. Louis (we didn’t go to the same one). But, knowing where he went to school and where I went to school, I am all but 100% certain that we crossed paths quite a few times in the ye olde ancient days of 1991 to 1995, at various contests, events, fairs.

    I wish I could remember him, though. For the life of me, I don’t.

  3. Brad, are you telling me you trust Congress (!) more than private companies to protect your freedom of speech? I’ve struggled over reconciling Twitter’s and SJW crowd’s (admittedly inconsistent and hypocritical) embrace of “freedom of association,” and corporate shitweasels openly fighting for the enemy for reasons of profit plenty. I ultimately see the problem as irreconcilable in the sense of forcing the big guys to accommodate us, but that doesn’t prevent the insurgents like 4Chan from doing so.

    Either way, color me skeptical of turning the decision over whether we get a voice, free of censorship, to freaking Congress!

    Your post office and telephone examples don’t really apply because by nature of those communications, knowing CONTENT is next to impossible. Not so if the Internet is handed over to the tender mercies of enemies.

    • Yes, I do.

      The Post Office has never once censored me. I’ve frequently encountered censorship on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit. I’ve also seen private companies like Patreon, PayPal and Gofundme engage political censorship. Don’t even get me started on “no platforming” at private hotels. They are the worst.

      The fact that we have to hold our conferences on 1.) government property, 2.) on private property or 3.) in secret only goes to show how the free market is not on our side.

      • No Platforming at private hotels is why Jared Taylor has to hold Amren conferences at Montgomery Bell Tennessee State Park. Richard Spencer also said NPI will never be able to do a dinner at a restaurant after the 2016 Conference and will have to meet at public spaces like the Ronald Reagan DC building.

        • You’re more optimistic than I am Congress won’t soon try to legislate their venerable public facilities be prohibited from providing a forum for “hate.”

          • Banning hate speech from public facilities won’t stand up to 1st Amendment court appeals. Make no mistake, Hillary would have passed hate speech laws had she won.

      • I wonder if a court case would equate Alt-Right to Homosexual? I know that’s odd but it would seem that you can’t have the right to censor without having the right to censor the other.

  5. “and other social media monopolies”

    And there is the same censorship on TV and in the newspapers.
    What we have is jew market, not free market.

    “Congress should buy Twitter”

    It would be cheaper to hire a few IT technicians, invest in a few servers, and launch a competing public service. And that would be the end of Twitter!

    • You would have to give us more to go on. Using the search function at Drudge with “social media” gives many headlines.

  8. Excellent commentary, HW. Our free speech rights are being violated by the arbitrary “suspension” of twitter accounts. Our right to conduct legitimate business and financial transactions online is being denied by PayPal. If everyone who held an unpopular or controversial point of view was denied access to social media or online payment services there would be no customers at all. I believe what’s going on here is something that liberals usually get quite upset about – DISCRIMINATION.

  9. Is it really that hard to create alternate platforms? Consider:

    Google ==> Startpage, DuckDuckGo
    Wikipedia ==> Infogalactic
    Reddit ==> voat.co
    Twitter ==> gab.ai
    4chan ==> 8chan (4chan’s owner’s then-girlfriend convinced him to censor GamerGate)

    Twitter’s been quietly censoring right-wingers for ages, but if they ever expel Donald Trump, he’ll be on Gab the next day and TWTR will be penny stock.

      • I finally applied tonight and got in within 2 hours. Are you using a GMX account, or something? Create a yahoo or gmail or msn or aol account. Something mainstream.

        • “yahoo or gmail or msn or aol”

          They are part of the US Government’s 5 Eyes spy program.

          Start using non-US email providers listed here:
          privacytools dot io

          I am on Gab myself, but its usability after Twitter is awful.

    • How long before (((they))) get around to buying those out and censoring them, though?. They didnt invent movies or the internet either. They just moved in very quickly, first with investment, then board membership, then as Presidents/CEOs.

    • We need one for podcasts, and then we’re good, I think.

      And it will be good for dating too. With only conservative women, you can reduce the skank quotient.

  10. “the Post Office is uncensored.”
    Except for one time: the censorship of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s

  11. Perhaps Dorsey is running his money through Christian Wolf’s ZZZ Accounting. DeRay’s Nails and Rims is the cash business fence…

  12. There is no “free market” in the US, therefore it could hardly have failed.

    Any government involvement, and there is massive government involvement including restrictions that benefit corporations at the expense of the rest of us, skews the market in different ways, often unpredictable ways.

    Again, any government involvement means there’s no free market, and since there is massive government involvement, there’s no free market in the US. This is a condition that’s existed for a long time, at least beginning with the Hoover Administration. The following Roosevelt years were like Hoover on steroids.

  13. Let’s do a White House petition, and let’s write to the White House.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact#page

    P.S. – there used to be a Comment line for the White House. It’s been shut down for quite some time. Trump gets blamed, but the Comment line was shut down long before Trump took office. I understand why the Comment line is still closed; the obscenities and vile abuse would be non-stop. We can still write, though.

  14. Places where dissent has been allowed:
    IMdb … closing on 2/20/17
    Disqus … already not updating user’s home pages for a week, and not responding to user complaints, ….probably not long for this world

    The irony on the Twitter front (where Twitter was able to throttle me down to
    1/20th of my previous engagement ~ I dont even bother with it anymore) is that I have an advanced degree* and was donating 22nd-grade level prose to their app for free. Yet Twitter Jack would prefer people posting “Muh d*ck” than that, apparently.

    We know what caused it: the Hive mentality. Even Jack with all his millions, living in one of those Hearst castles out there in the Valley, likes to see people every once in awhile. And at all the parties he gets asked, “What are you doing about the alt-right on Twitter? I think you’re a terrible man for allowing this. I better pepper-spray you!.”

    * Yeah I know it sounds a little bit like, “I’M A PROFESSOR!!”… sorry!

  15. Why would you want the government to buy it? When the Democrats get power again they own all social media? You know what happens then.

    Why not force them to deal with ALL customers, like they force Christian bakers to bake cakes for sodomites?

    Why bail out losers like Twitter? They can’t sell Twitter, because its not profitable.

  16. Correct. It needs to be a totally neutral and monitored by a Blue Ribbon Committee and software, which is very good at cataloguing phrases and words, their frequency and context.

    5, that’s right, 5 Jewish families control all major media in the USSA. And that doesn’t include total control of Hollywood by Jews. Even sports media AND the teams are now majority Jewish control. And these Jews are Hostile, anti-American nation state, and definitely anti-White, Caucasian, and Goyim-who they consider expendable commodities.

  17. As an aside. We’ve been given the golden
    opportunity to gut out and destroy the Left. The Trump Administration just has to do it.

  18. So left wing disinformation is better than ‘right wing’ disinformation? WTF?

    What would be funny is for Trump to buy Twitter with advice and help from Peter Thiel. Imagine the leftist foaming at the mouth over this one. That alone would be reason enough to do it.

  19. Brother Nathan has told President Trump via video to nationalize the media and put it under a strict code of honesty.

  20. All could learn something from the First Amendment. However the liberals don’t care much about Freedom of Speech for our People. That’s especially true on Social Media. Those companies have gigantic internet traffic and should be respectful of all political views. WPWW !

  21. I was among the first people pushing #NationalizeTwitter as soon as I saw what they were doing. All we needed/wanted was a level playing field.

    there’s nothing stopping Nazis from creating our own media and no-platforming the jews. The problem is its so damn hard to keep the kikes from sneaking in and reversing policy.

    The problem isnt so much an issue of the domestic free market, but rather the fact that we allow natural authoritarians, like jews, to engage in this monopolistic behavior

    Andrew Jackson would have applied free speech principles and freedom of association to corporate law.

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