Most of you reading this will be aware that Zerohedge’s prolific and highly popular twitter account with over 670,000 followers was on the receiving end of a lifetime ban by the Twitter politburo. This post won’t focus on the details of this specific ban, but if you want to read more about it, see the following: Zerohedge Suspended On Twitter.
It’s imperative not to overly focus on the individual victims of tech giant bans, and instead zero in on the bigger picture. Rather than debating whether or not you like Zerohedge, or whether you think it crossed a line, I want to highlight the dangerous implications of dominant social media companies wielding permanent bans as a weapon against freedom of speech in practice.
This post will cover three main issues. First, the fact that Twitter and other social media companies have essentially created a caste system when it comes to engagement on their platforms. Second, the question of whether or not a lifetime ban from social media platforms is an ethical concept. Third, the dangers of Twitter essentially throwing the entire timeline of a banished account into the memory hole.
For all intents and purposes, @Twitter has created a caste system on its platform. This goes against the entire spirit of why almost all of us joined social media. It’s a massive, dangerous problem and it must be addressed.
I’ll be touching on this and much more in a post later.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 3, 2020
As the internet and social media started gaining traction, the idea of the “citizen journalist” grew increasingly popular and the public discovered how all sorts of previously unknown people can bring a great deal of hidden information and interesting perspectives to the table. This led to competing narratives on all sorts of topics, and we all basically agreed it’s best to treat people like adults and let them sort things out for themselves. That is, until Hillary Clinton lost an election.
At that point, a certain segment of the population went completely mental and started demanding social media companies fight and censor “fake news.” This anti-liberal perspective, largely promoted by self-proclaimed liberals, deeply affected how social media executives think about and treat platform content in the subsequent years. The result has been that Twitter and other tech giants have effectively created a caste system on their platforms. Though they won’t explicitly admit it, the executives at these companies now seem to believe certain people and organizations should be given priority to shape the national narrative, while others should be diminished. While they tolerate the latter group until they become too influential and disruptive, the former class exists at a level entirely above Twitter’s terms of service. Certain people and organizations are permitted to do whatever they like on the platform, while others are subject to increasingly arbitrary and subjective bans. It’s rapidly becoming an intentionally rigged system designed to reallocate narrative control in a certain direction.
Ask yourself, do you think there’s anything CNN could do to get banned from Twitter for life? I don’t. I genuinely think the news organization CNN can do absolutely anything it wants on or off Twitter and never be considered for a lifetime ban. Why? It’s a protected organization. CNN is above the Twitter law, and as such exists at the very top of the social media caste system. It’s not just CNN of course, there are many individuals and organizations simply not subject to Twitter’s terms of service in the way you or I are. A politician calling for mass government violence abroad (war) is another example. This sort of thing happens regularly without any consequences. Why? Twitter has determined advocating for preemptive government violence is considered reasonable. They’ve determined advocating for one form of violence (war) is fine, but advocating for other kinds of violence is not. Nobody asked for any of this, but here we are.
The next thing I want to discuss is the entire concept of a lifetime ban from a dominant social media company like Twitter. The more I think about it, the more ethically indefensible this practice appears to be. Just as we shouldn’t jail a person for life except under the most extreme circumstances, we shouldn’t be comfortable flippantly banning people forever on large social media platforms. Such action assumes people can’t and don’t change, but Twitter doesn’t seem to be looking at the enforcement of its terms of service from a fundamentally fair or ethical point of view. Executives are increasingly utilizing this most extreme form of punishment, the lifetime ban, at the drop of a hat for minor or misunderstood violations. There are many other ways Twitter could deal with what it deems to be serious violations. You can have three month, six month or even year long bans, but a lifetime banishment is an extreme and indefensible position in almost all cases I’ve observed in recent months.
As such, it’s become clear to me Twitter isn’t using this tool in order to enforce its terms of service, but rather its terms of service exist to provide an excuse to eliminate anyone or any account executives or Brooklyn-based corporate bloggers deem unpalatable.
I wonder if there’s a direct line from Buzzfeed blue checks to @jack to report thought crime.
1-800 protect me from opinions that conflict with yuppie Brooklyn
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 2, 2020
I know, I know “muh private company,” but let’s discuss reality. If I were to be personally banned from Twitter, my voice in the public sphere would be materially diminished.
This is when you’re supposed to instruct me to start my own Twitter or join an alternative, but the truth is Twitter dominates the very socially and politically important micro-blogging space in the U.S. It’s the preferred communications platform of President Trump for crying out loud. You end my existence there and you extinguish my voice in a very material way for the foreseeable future, yet Twitter can do this at any moment for whatever reason. If a social media company decides they want you gone, they can always come up with an excuse eventually. Is this a major problem? I think so.
If I were Trump I’d make social media bans central to my entire 2020 run.
But he isn’t doing that because he’s too focused on pumping the stock market and not finding Ghislaine Maxwell.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 3, 2020
Finally, I want to end with another disturbing aspect of the lifetime Twitter ban. Even if you accept it as a justifiable concept, and I generally speaking do not, the way they handle it is particularly problematic. When an account like Zerohegde is banned, you lose the ability to easily search historical tweets, which is in this case means hundreds of thousands of comments made over a decade. If you go to the defunct @zerohedge handle this is what you’ll see:
This page is completely dead. You can’t go back and look at old tweets, 99% of which didn’t violate any terms of service and collectively make up an important part of post-financial crisis history. It becomes far more challenging for any of us, or future historians who want to research this period, to write about Zerohedge and the role it played over the past decade with this information now much harder to find. This is fundamentally unethical and feels like the modern equivalent of burning books. If the company’s going to ban accounts for life, it should at the very least leave the historical record up and easily searchable.
But Twitter doesn’t care. It doesn’t care because the lifetime ban functions as an intentionally arbitrary, cruel and vindictive tool of coercion. It’s intended to scare people and ultimately create a rigged playing field where different individuals and organizations play by distinct rules on the platform. That way the overall public narrative can be manipulated in a certain direction that tends to overlap with the dominant consensus opinions of San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C.
The beatings will continue until thought crimes are extinguished.
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People get the corporations they deserve.
“I don’t fool with no facebook. No twitters and tweets.” ~ Elvin Bishop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsVN15irR3E
Who cares if “Twitter’s the preferred communications platform of President Trump?” The whole concept of twitter was ridiculous from the start, and I live better not “following” Trump’s words but watching his actions (and there’s a huge disconnect in case you haven’t noticed, which renders the words a waste of time).
Personally, I think the censorship being exerted across (anti)social media is great. It is actually increasing transparency. THEY are becoming transparent to the point that perhaps more people will wake the F up.
Good point Warren
Interesting article as always.
I doubt Hillary not getting the pyramid cap’s nod is the primary reason for growing censorship across society as a whole and not just on the major social media platforms. Trump has served the cap’s interests just as well as Hillary would have served the hidden hand.
The origin of these platforms is lost in the shadows to begin with and are the likely constructs of societal controlling entities both within the deep state and its controllers in the shadow government. On a personal note I never liked the idea behind FB and consider 140 spaces as a limit to dialogue a joke and at the same time as a conscious plot.Enough said then on that.
Without being a constitutional lawyer what can one say about Co. vs Riggs which granted corporations legal person hood or Citizens United which extended the right of corporations to purchase free speech in their own interests in political affairs. We can all see the direction headed in when corporations like Twitter are given free speech to influence the public but they in turn can deny free speech to the public that uses their public address system. This as a rather eat your cake and have it too as Twitter gets to set the direction of discourse, having and at once also censoring speech at its whim. Nice gig if you can get it and you’re the very essence of an authoritarian.
As for ZH I don’t trust their bona fides beyond what such a site might mean to those that might like to influence such a micro population segment. Just my natural way these days even though I check that site almost everyday.You have to watch a site’s trending.
Censorship of the internet, taking control of the narrative, is a front of great concern to the globalist forces. We see censorship of the internet being advanced now in Russia as it already is in China. Parallels exist for doing the same in the west and other areas of the world as part of an incremental and sequential implementation of globalist’s agenda ushered through a variety of international institutions, the UN, world banking and even twitter. All these fronts could be said to come under the roof of sustainable development. So did ZH dox a scientist and by extension the coronavirus op and then by extension sustainable development? Does anyone remember Zika….the Boston Marathon event and lock down, SARS and the massive waste of taxpayers dollars on totally ineffective Tamifl at whose profitiing? I could gone on for some time but why as either we can see the direction society and culture are being herded in or we can’t.
We’re in power, so use it. We’re not never trump perma-losers. Killing a conservative acct with 670k followers is outrageous and unacceptable. Find a way and do it, asap. might i suggest IRS, SEC, FBI, State Dept, Commerce over-reach? Let the media over-react or impeach or whatever. One good turn deserves another. When is their outrageous conduct ever going to be enough for a free people? Only when they get a hard shove back. Just do it.
Who is “we”? Unless you’re well connected and fabulously wealthy, you are most assuredly not in power. Just because you vote red/blue does not make you part of the club. One of the major reasons the USA is so screwed up is that people refuse to learn that simple lesson.
Trump would rather listen to the Kardashians all day than a single utterance from you, me, or anyone else here.
Here here .. ! Social media addresses the emptiness people have inside .
I for one wish Facebook/ Twitter & would slither down the dark hole it came from.
I also was banned @jasonus_habilis 2 days before ZH and had been tweeting alongside them the last 10 years
“Only the little people pay taxes…..” There has always been a caste system, the lower caste is just beginning to figure it out.
All of which is largely irrelevant. If Big Social wants to discriminate against people they perceive as disagreeing with them it is their right and privilege to do so. The problem is that the big players have competitors. They’re small fry at the moment but if Big Social picks the wrong target they could grow exponentially overnight. Even PDT has backup accounts on these upcoming social media sites.
So it’s a shame that Twitter deplatformed Zero Hedge. Shake the dust from their figurative shoes and move over to Gab or one of the other up and coming Twitter alternatives.
Large corporations have adapted to this non-competitive environment. Rather than trying to have a quality product, they spend their time and treasure on buying up/eliminating competition and pumping their own stock prices. Seems to have worked fantastically for them so far.
This is why I get surly with many self-proclaimed conservatives who see little wrong with bankers anointing winners and losers.
Republicans of the world unite! Banning social media accounts is a social construct!
Banning social media accounts is a Leftist “social construct.” Leftists and the Neo-Socialist Democratic American Party (NSDAP) power structures are nothing more than ideological social constructs themselves. A very large number of Americans have awakened to this reality and they realize that Leftist power structures are the very form of Fascism the Leftists say they hate. It is now time for sane people to dump Twitter, Facebook, and the other Socialist, hegemonic means of controlling every aspect of a person’s life from their position of control. From the liberated point of freedom from “socialist media platforms,” those who support the philosophy of John Galt will begin to apply truly effective counter-revolutionary means for destroying the extremely fragile edifice of Leftists and the Neo-Socialist Democratic American Party (NSDAP) power in our country. This Republic for which it stands belongs to Americans who have the wisdom and courage to beat the true Neo-Fascist Leftists (NFL) at their own game and run them out of America. This country is only big enough for Republicans!
“John Galt” is, as most here know full-well, a fictional character….entirely make-believe, with no actual human prototype in the real Living World….a “virtual“ figment of a fevered imagination. “Social media” is equally empty of any actual organic substance.
The sooner captive “users” realize that no real communication between actual Human Beings can ever happen within that machine-made virtuality called “cyberspace,” the better. Then their precious attention can be given back to actual conditions (including their own) right here-and-now in Earth’s Whole Living Arrangement….instead of being completely wasted in the by-design DEAD END futility that is “social media.”
So maybe, in-spite of their intentions, these “platform” commissars are doing us all a favor by excluding everything and everybody not conforming to their extremely constricted, ignorance-based, fear-driven, and ultimately suffocating “dominance” paradigm. Meantime, a few conspiratorial deep breaths can’t hurt.
Zerohedge didn’t “dox” the researcher, they merely REpublished an article which contained ALREADY PUBLICLY AVAILABLE PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION. What good is research if the source is unknown… less than reliable. ZH didn’t give the researcher’s personal info. BS called…
A travesty… I check ZH throughout the day… there is no better coverage of monetary policy.
Check voice.com for new era social network.
Banning ZH was a necessary precursor to the collapse of the US dollar and the entire USA monetary system. The powers-that-be could not possibly get out of stocks and into gold without being noticed if luminaries like ZH were allowed to point it out while it happens.
Not part of the Twitterverse. Don’t miss it. The FB wasteland is quite enough.
Their behavior is not merely unethical. It’s highly illegal, and there’s case law in several domains from employment law to contract law backing that up.
The tech giant are not, in fact, able to do anything they want on their platforms. And their lawyers aren’t actually all that good.
They just win because very few people fight back intelligently. Some do. It doesn’t get much coverage, but these victories absolutely exist.
Twitter is a joke. Don’t use it…
Surely to goodness, we can live without twitter. I know this is not what some people want to hear, but why don’t Conservatives on mass exit this stupid platform? Let it spiral into a Left-wing circle jerk. Anyone listen to Jack speak. He’s a dummy. Move on and leave twitter to the twittless.
Today’s ZeroHedge is not the same thing as the days of Reggie Middleton, Fonestar and MillionDollarBonus. Zerohedge=X22Report=SGTReport=Q=Alex Jones=.GOV.
I don’t know why they are engaging in de-platforming theater with government operatives Alex Jones and Zero Hedge, and don’t care.
Hi Michael.
I was an avid follower of yours and recently got the axe on Twitter for the 2nd time.
Im also a commenter at ZH. Imagine my surprise when they were booted off Twitter (NOT), but all the history via Tweets etc gone really bothered me as ZH posts lots of articles about the markets and the Fed. Maybe as Fed desperation with nightly repos continues and the economy falters, had something to do with ZH demise. But that’s just a guess.
Twitter FB Instagram recent removal of anything Soleimani was also a perfect example of coordinated overreach with censorship. Also criticism of Israeli war crimes got me booted off Twitter twice. Can’t do that much anymore either.
Anyway, a lot of folks on Twitter have set up alternative accounts at a place called VK.com., a social media site Set up kinda like FB but there is ZERO censorship and is relatively easy to navigate.
Some folks there have already been banned from Twitter, some are preparing for when that dark day comes. Even major outlets like RT are already there. Press TV too. It grows more everyday. Its nice not to have to worry about saying something that will get you canned.
Anyway, check it out. I keep trying to get the Tyler’s to pay a visit there maybe set up an account.
Thousands have been pushed off Twitter. I don’t see that coming to an end anytime soon.
wondering if the Corona-Virus was present in Davos ?
There was a large chinese delegation in Davos 2020
New article about the Wuhan Lab and the Sea-Food-Market:
https://www.hk01.com/%E7%A4%BE%E6%9C%83%E6%96%B0%E8%81%9E/435123/%E6%AD%A6%E6%BC%A2%E8%82%BA%E7%82%8E-%E6%AD%A6%E6%BC%A2%E7%96%BE%E6%8E%A7%E7%A0%94%E7%A9%B6%E5%93%A1%E6%9B%BE%E8%A2%AB%E8%9D%99%E8%9D%A0%E8%A5%B2%E6%93%8A-%E5%85%A7%E5%9C%B0%E5%AD%B8%E8%80%85%E8%B3%AA%E7%96%91%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E6%B4%A9%E6%BC%8F