Smears in the Groan

We really shouldn’t be surprised that the Guardian – a far left rag – would smear its political opponent. I think it’s the sheer lack of any attempt to hide what they are doing that surprises.

At least 14 Conservative MPs, including several ministers, cabinet minister Michael Gove and a number of prominent Tory commentators joined Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right that was forced offline last week for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs.

The lack of self-awareness on display is staggering. Twatter and Farcebook have plenty of nasty content but that gets overlooked. Yet they are happy enough for these oligarchies to effectively ban dissenting voices and to smear anyone who has an account with the platform as being “far right”. Far right here simply means disagrees with the Guardian and the nasty little communists like Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar. The hypocrisy on display is planet-sized. These are the people that don’t like capitalism, yet when the crony capitalists are on their side, the abuse of monopoly is all fine and dandy.

I’ve listened to Amy Piekoff explain what happened to Parler and why. They don’t use algorithms to police their site, preferring to deal with abuses manually. This appears to me to be a rational approach, but it’s not good enough for the scum of big tech.

If you don’t like our rules, the say, build your own, but if you do, we will still come for you.

Despite the obvious abuse of crony capitalism in league with one political viewpoint, I still come across those naive enough to argue that this is simply a matter of private enterprise policing their own property. Anyone still clinging to that argument – that only governments can censor speech – hasn’t been paying attention.

They persecuted Gab and Gab responded with its own servers and using alternative payment methods, because not only did the tech giants go after them, so, too did the payment processors. Now the scumbags are going after Minds.

Make no mistake here, this is a concerted effort to silence a particular set of viewpoints – government and technology companies are in lockstep. Don’t expect the Biden administration to rein these monopolies in any time soon.

Comerford added: “Platforms like Parler must be understood as part of a broad online extremist ecosystem, ranging from mainstream social media platforms, imageboard sites like the chans, to encrypted-messenger apps like Telegram, all of which play roles in helping extremists to mobilise, organise and propagandise.”

That’s a pretty accurate description of Twitter.

That said, Australia and Poland are fighting back and that’s no bad thing. Google are even talking of switching off in Australia. Oh, dear, how sad, never mind.

What would be nice would be to see these big tech executives sitting in shop doorways begging for enough change for a cup of tea, having been sued into penury.

Okay, okay, I know, but the thought gives me a nice warm glow.