Illegal Monopoly Google and Its Illegal Monopoly YouTube Announce They Will Ban All Ads and All Content Disputing the "Climate Change" Hoax

They control the political discourse in the country, and 90% of the internet advertising market.

If they are allowed to ban viewpoints from YouTube and from GoogleAds, they decide what Americans are allowed to believe, and what we're allowed to vote for.

Google and YouTube on Thursday announced a new policy that prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments.

Why it matters: It's one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation.

Details: Google advertisers and publishers, as well as YouTube creators, will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts "well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change," the company's ads team said in a statement.

"This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."

Ads and monetization will still be allowed to run alongside other climate-related topics, like public debates on climate policy, impacts of climate change, and new research around the issue.

Google said it's making these changes in response to frustration from advertisers and content creators about their messages appearing alongside climate denialism.

...

The company says it has consulted with experts, like representatives of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports, to create the policy. The report found that there is "unequivocal" evidence showing that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing global warming."

Will the SPLC be advising them as well?

Of course they will. Just not on climate.

The big picture: Internet companies have been under increased pressure from climate activists to do more to address climate change denial on their platforms.

And the Democrat Party.

Again, given that Google can and should be broken up or sharply limited, and they know this, and the Democrats keep threatening to do exactly that, they constantly permit the Democrat Party to become their de facto "Trust and Safety Council."

They admit that here:

In February, Facebook expanded an online portal meant to counter misinformation about climate change.

Why it matters: Social media platforms have immense reach, and they've come under fire from activists and some lawmakers globally for doing too little to thwart the spread of inaccurate content.

Glenn Greenwald notes what many have suggested -- that the current "whistleblower" is another ringer working with Democrats to advance their political goals.

Which is not to break up or limit FaceBook (or Google, or Twitter), but to merely create a Censorship Board to control them, which in turn will be controlled by the Democrat Party and their Deep State operatives.

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

...

There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants -- along with Amazon and Apple -- are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.

But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.

Well... these monopolies do not act to advance the political interests of the GOP. All they do is pay them off with bribe money.

The Democrats get both bribe money and their political interests advanced.

And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as "hate, violence and misinformation."

...

Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.

As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.

...

When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation's discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.

This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all.

As I've argued, it is these illegal monopolies' status as illegal monopolies that makes them so easily threatened to act as the Digital Gestapo of the Democrat Party. They must be made legal -- with appropriate restrictions -- or else they will continue to censor conservatives as an offering to the Democrat Party to not take action against then.

For God's sake, they've collectively decided the former President of the United States, and possibly the next President of the United States, is not permitted to communicate with the American people via supposed "social" media.

And of course the Establishment Plutocrat wing of the GOP makes up excuses as to why this is good and fine, because, in this one case, the tech monopolies are advancing their political interests by deciding who and who cannot run for President of the United States of America.

"They're just expressing their own speech," the Establishment Plutocrat wing lies, ignoring the fact that 1, monopolies are forbidden to use their monopoly power to affect a different market, and 2, when government actors threaten a supposedly private corporation to make free speech restrictions, the private corporation becomes a government actor as far as first amendment jurisprudence is concerned.

"Build your own tech platforms," the Establishment Plutocrat wing lies, ignoring the fact that we've tried that -- and the monopolies acted in illegal coordination to gate-keep those challengers out of the market.

posted by Ace at 01:09 PM

| Access Comments