In the most recent but not likely to be the last case of deplatforming, InfoWars and Alex Jones have been removed from Roku following complaints from viewers. It’s their legal right to do so but censorship is worrisome because it usually falls harder on the Left than the Right.
Standard Responses to Most Censorship
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
7 Comments. Leave new
Which in turn explains your observation that censhorship «usually falls harder on the Lerft than the Right»….
Henri
Funny how a string of “rights” can make a “wrong” – I agree with everything stated in the captions, and I also agree with Ted’s conclusion.
Signed,
Firmly Straddling the Fence
PS: Bring back the Fairness Doctrine: Then you COULD force a publisher to run something they don’t want to.
Calls for corporate paternalism to protect the feeble-minded unthinking populace is merely a prelude to authoritarianism.
Roku’s decision is a little unnerving. I have been using it for nearly 8 years, and it doesn’t work like Facebook or yahoo or other so called newsfeed. These sites comingle clickbait, malware, fake news sites with regular contents. Mixing garbage with real content on their front page is a problem with those sites.
Roku doesn’t do that. It would have required at least 5 intentional decisions to view infowar’s content for the first time. First the person would have need to go into a streaming channel menu, and search for infowars. Second, you need to click on the information screen for the channel. Third you need to select Add Channel to your device. (If it was a pay site, there would be another step to confirm billing) Fourth you need to open the channel after it is loaded. Finally, the person would need to select which content to view.
I didn’t mind having Infowars removed from mainstream newsfeeds since I couldn’t prevent it from being in my feed. It is another thing to prevent people from viewing it that want to view it.
Conspiracies exist. One online dictionary suggests the word has been with us for ‹600 years from Middle English.
Those perpetually committing the worst conspiracies attempt to hide them by including among their MANY propaganda memes (AST***) “conspiracy theory.”
*** American Soft Totalitarianism©
PS
How can I have been so silly.
Please note change to a more easy to remember acronym and a more meaningful name to its underlying phenomenon.
The former AST© is now EAST©
This stands for:
EXCEPTIONAL American Soft Totalitarianism©
I dunno, the former would be pronounced “assed” … which seems like a good acronym to me.
😉