August 28th, 2018
Social media companies like FakeBook, Twitter, Google, InstaGram, etc. have become the modern day information equivalents of the first power and public service utilities.
Instead of water molecules, gas, sewer, or electrons (electricity) entering and exiting your home to keep your life running, today’s digital social media companies transmit photons and ones and zeros to your laptop and handheld device. The net result for the end user is that all these things are all one and the same utility service, and they serve the same function.
Just like the power company, say PPL, and the gas company, and the water company cannot discriminate against users of their services, so the same applies to the digital information companies above.
For example, you do not come home at night, flick the light switch on your wall, and remain in darkness because you got a call earlier in the day from PPL saying “Sorry, Jane, we have turned off your electricity, because we have determined that your political views are contrary to our arbitrary and vague terms of service and our company’s values.”
PPL and other utilities must provide their services and products equally to all who pay for them.
It is time to hold digital utility service providers to the same exact standard. No discrimination against users.
Presently, Google so obviously fakes its search results to favor political candidates and campaigns the owners of Google favor. Google’s politicization of search results on every subject and person is egregious.
Like Google, FakeBook also obviously discriminates against conservatives, engaging in shadowbanning and hiding messages its liberal owners do not want the public to see. Worse, Fakebook has made a lucrative business charging its users for advertising, but the person who pays for that service never knows just how far their investment went, because FakeBook deliberately withholds information about its actual efforts. It is a blind item, exactly the opposite of what it should be: Open and transparent.
Twitter’s legendary war against non-liberals is the most public form of censorship. As illiberal as this censorship is, liberals still cheer.
These companies and the many other liberal book-burners in the digital media business have declared war on ideas and people they simply disagree with. It is time to end this assault on the First Amendment rights of American citizens who have entrusted these companies to abide by universal free speech standards.
It is time to regulate these companies like the public utilities they have become, to prevent them from illegally discriminating against people who merely disagree with their owners.
Treat us all the same legally.
February 24th, 2015
As intriguing as the thought of artificial intelligence may be, the truth is always so much more prosaic and humble.
The last frontier and the only real outpost of true free speech, the Internet was never broken, it needed no fixing. And yet the Obama administration, through the FCC and FEC, is planning on regulating it like a utility and then regulating its content.
If you have a website, like this blog, you will have to apply for a license, just like a radio or TV station. Imagine some government bureaucrat not liking the message of smaller, more accountable government on this or similar websites, and then not issuing the necessary license to have it in the first place. Your free speech, my free speech, is shut off, shut down, by the very government that is supposed to guarantee the First Amendment.
That is the FCC role.
And then if I write things that are supportive of one candidate over another, it’ll count as an in-kind contribution to that candidate’s campaign. Imagine an army of government bureaucrats monitoring free speech on the Internet, and writing down and tabulating what people say and write on their blogs as campaign contributions.
That is the FEC proposal, and it is none too supportive of free speech, either.
And mind you, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other establishment and legacy media will all get passes. They can continue to be active arms of one particular political party, and their writings, their endorsements, will not count as in-kind campaign contributions.
While all this government interference and control in our private lives seems insane to the normal freedom-loving American, it is, in fact, what is happening right now. “Net neutrality” sounds, well, neutral, and it is anything but that.
Tempting as it is to say “And then add this to the IRS political suppression and NSA spying scandals…,” the truth is that few people seem to care, no matter what Obama does. Americans are willingly giving up their freedoms, their control of government, their tax money, their security, to a man who clearly does not like America as it has been founded and run since 1776.
Apparently, government control of Internet content and our individual personal lives fits into that general malaise. Sad.
What is even sadder is that so many people so much want one particular party to have complete control that they will do all of this, plus grant amnesty to illegal aliens to overrun the established voters who built the nation. None of this is sustainable. No nation can withstand this.