SOCIAL MEDIA DISTANCING

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

I don’t know if you are paying attention but the Cancel Culture has declared war on social media and they are now utilizing the mob powers to pressure big companies to pull advertising support from social media platforms who they feel are the biggest offenders when it comes to hate speech and allowing for political dissent.

The growing number of companies that are pausing ads on Facebook in response to the social media giant’s handling of hate speech and violence is starting to have a notable effect on the company’s share price.

Verizon pulled their advertising from Facebook.

Unilever is a company that is an umbrella for several products that has now boycotted Facebook, creating a 7 billion dollar loss.

Other companies like REI, Patagonia, North Face, Eddie Bauer, , Upwork, and Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s have also joined the boycott.

“Based on the current polarization and the election that we are having in the U.S., there needs to be much more enforcement in the area of hate speech,” said Luis Di Como, Unilever’s executive vice president of global media, in an interview.

“Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society,” the company said in a statement. Its Facebook ban also will cover Instagram.

Mr. Di Como said Unilever would like to see a reduction in the level of hate speech on the platforms and wants independent companies to measure and confirm that progress has been made. As Fortune reports, the movement was launched last week by advocacy groups including the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Common Sense Media.

They asked businesses to pause their advertising on Facebook in July to send a “powerful message”:

“Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism, and violence.”

Coca Cola said Friday that it will be removing its millions of dollars in advertising from all social media platforms completely for the next 30 days. The company said the move is not part of the growing number of advertisers boycotting Facebook over its content moderation policies, but “time to reassess our advertising policies to determine whether revisions are needed.”

I don’t think I believe that but oh well – the Cancel Culture is getting tougher.

This is corporate virtue signaling and analysts claim it won’t really put a dent in anything

However, to ignore this strike is an ignorant and dangerous thing especially when you are a high profile entity that is seen as controversial – social media, and even online publishers which includes bloggers, YouTube producers and podcasts.

People like me, and others who are doing some of the same material.

The avalanche has started now and remember “silence is violence” is the new normal, so if you’re a CEO who advertises on Facebook, how do you not boycott now?

As much as people want to see Facebook go down in flames, the movements for big companies to pull money because of political views sets a very dangerous precedent.

While at the moment that focus of these boycotts is on Mark Zuckerberg’s bank account, the other people who make their living off of putting the government in check are suffering as well.

When they came for Alex Jones, the media cheered but I could see what was happening and immediately felt like a deer in the headlights—I knew that eventually I had to create a safe space.

So I built a library to save my content and invited listeners to join.

However, now I am seeing a trend and it is getting a bit harder to get information out to people that is outside the framed narrative of the legacy media.

GAB, a news service on the internet was recently blacklisted by Visa for allegedly promoting hate speech.

Zero Hedge and The Federalist had their comment sections censored by Google, and VDARE is getting banned by their domain registrar. All of this is coordinated. It’s targeted.

President Trump has done nothing and Congress won’t either – they can’t legislate what businesses do with their money.

No one is coming to save them and no one is coming to save you.

It’s on all of us to save ourselves.

The millions of people acting without moral restraint, without reason and without fear of consequences on the Internet are the problem. Indeed, the digital mob is the unintended consequence of the Internet itself. Connecting the world via technology was supposed to encourage communication, understanding and a breaking down of barriers. Instead it has resulted in a world divided into silos, special interests, identity groups. We tend to seek out those we have the most in common with and to block, ban or troll those who are unlike us. We feel safety in numbers, and from that safety is often bred outright contempt for those who think differently. Though we must live side by side with people in our families, our workplaces and our schools who have diverse points of view, we are under no such obligation online, where unfriending is much easier than “un-neighboring.”

That has emboldened people to be the loudest, harshest, most vulgar voice in their group. Such uncivil behavior can bring fame and money. And yes, praise. Target and shame those who violate your group’s ideological dogma, and you will be echoed, retweeted, and revered. But if you dare to defend the person or institution under attack, if you ask for forbearance or forgiveness, you will be the next target.

I know that many of you that participate in social media have posted something that is controversial about what is happening in the world. Anything from COVID-19, to the defunding of the police, to memes that poke fun at politicians.

While you think that what you are doing is important and that the information you are passing around is unique and a different view on the world, social media has a different view and so you are shadow banned without warning. You are silenced because of fact checking or worse you wind up in Facebook jail.

You think, this is an outrage, I have my First Amendment rights and they just silenced me.

Let’s say that you express yourself by making videos and submitting them to you tube. People hit the like button on your video, your hits are growing exponentially. Someone suggests that you monetize your video. You think, sure I will make a few bucks and be the next “Chocolate Rain” guy. You Tube doesn’t like something you said or you used a song or music that has a very stringent copyright on it.

For a long time now this has been happening and it has reduced all social media into becoming a homogenized mish-mash of political jabs and “Trump Sucks” memes.

Twitter admits that it removes half of all “abusive” tweets pro-actively. This is now done by automated algorithms with little possibility of a successful appeal.

Facebook has its censorship too, as do most of the other social media out there. They use similar Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do so, at a much faster pace and a cheaper cost than human content judgement. The problem is, that content is judged with the biases of the media companies, not always based on what is legal expression.

When first appearing on the scene a little after the turn of the millennium, they were advertised as the free public forums of the internet. Now they claim they can filter your content if they don’t like it.

This is forcing what I call Digital Yards, meaning that in order to escape being attacked or ignored, you have to create your own digital yard in order to social distance yourself from social media.

For example, if you were to compare Facebook to a public park, and at that public park you could do everything except drinking beer, putting a pig on spit and naked volleyball you could say that you understand why a public park would not want that.

But if you were to set up the same activities in your own yard with big walls to not offend the neighbors, what would you rather do?

I am sure that you would choose to have your own yard to play in where you can invite people that you know would not be offended by having a rowdy luau with clothing optional.

As we are heading for a “new reset” the idea of inviting people to your own digital yard is going to be happening a lot more.

The only problem with having your own digital yard is that eventually it will not escape the bots of the elite that wish to demand that you pay to have your own internet property.

So if you really want to have your own digital yard you eventually will have to pay protection money from electronic cartels that will monitor what is happening.

At the moment, the policing of the electronic yards is virtually nonexistent. That could also change as authorities in other countries are very nosy when they see attempts by people to do this.

The Bill of Rights is the only glue that exists to keep you afloat, and some countries are still somewhat adhering to the open internet like Canada.

Other countries without our Bill of Rights usually censor every packet of data entering and leaving, with respect to localized political and cultural biases. Tourists must often let all their electronics be searched for local digital infractions. America and a few small nations are all that stands for an open internet. Even then it’s pretty clear that the NSA monitors all US-bound international traffic (like if you use a VPN or Proxy not in the US, or visit a foreign website even – all legal for them). Even then the NSA may be using other countries’ intelligence officials to monitor domestic traffic.

People who have now realized that it is time to make their own digital yards are finding that it is costly, and a slow process with some glitches in the process.

This is why we made our move to our own private yard. The reason we did this is because we felt it would be a lot easier for the listener to join our private club, use our library, watch our videos, listen to our music and montages, and having their own social chats without having to jump through too many hoops.

Many people may see this as a hassle, some do not like the pay wall but in the end a $4.99 fee to come play in our online club will be a far cry from what they want to impose with the new reset.

I had to make the move because of what I see as a worse case scenario online where I would lose 25 years of my hard work and not have anything to show for it.

The new global reset is going to affect the internet in many ways.

It may require an ID, and it will keep a log of which websites you frequent that are recorded, separately taxed based on server locations, checked on a digital passport and filtered where applicable. Many of them will be flagged and you could be under the radar for the sites that are deemed radical or controversial.

That’s a worst-case scenario, but within the possibility in the new normal.

I realized after giving away my material for 25 years, I would go broke and my show would slowly fade away and all my hard work would go away with me leaving me no legacy for my family or the listeners.

The ability to use the net to go anywhere, learn anything, buy things, and speak out, is what brings explosive growth and wealth to all who embrace it. Even to those that merely provide the goods and services that people want. The internet is mostly capitalist, and a shining example of what that means for all. The ability to speak freely on all non-criminal speech is a precursor to a beneficial network infrastructure. Where it is stifled, so are people.

Censors can behave in unpredictable, arbitrary, and impulsive ways and no one has a sufficient monopoly on truth to serve as philosopher king over speech and debate.

When I read double-think statements from the progressives that “intolerance will not be tolerated” I have to stop down and ask, are people really that thick that they can’t see that the justice warriors are just making it up as they go along and that the cancel culture is going to eventually shut down any and all things that they do not agree with?

Are most people just going to bitch and moan about how their freedom of speech has been violated when they are seeing just how arbitrary it all is?

I decided I was done – I decided that I no longer needed platforms like Soundcloud demonetizing my efforts and demanding that I pay them so that my listeners can download enmasse.

I have noticed the utter failure of previous social-justice censorship regimes.

Now I am seeing that those who believe in this global reset are mainly progressive people in a room and they are there to socially engineer the marketplace of ideas.

They are banking on the idea that using the excuse of hate speech, or fringe thinking as an excuse to boycott will push social media like Facebook to take out the trash.

But that means they also want to filter out controversial ideas – when it would be better to have a safe yard to play in where administrators can curate their own feeds.

In a paid yard or club environment you avoid the hassles of big corporate entities muscling in on a speech environment that they don’t feel fits their ideals. It is not about making money – it is about selling to people who agree with your so called values.

This why that in the midst of the boycott culture there are companies that are opening their wallets because they are paying protection money in order to avoid having their metaphorical windows smashed by the Internet mob.

Rather than risk being targeted by the mob, corporations such as The Home Depot and Walmart have gladly and unabashedly donated to Black Lives Matter out of fear of reprisal. Other companies have been forced to rethink their brand names like Eskimo Pie, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben’s Rice.

It is also why almost all of our elected leaders, many of whom took an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, are silent about the assault on our history, our economy and our future. They don’t want to look racist, or insensitive, and if they come for you on social media and assault your character where are you going to hide when it all heats up?

You would have to retreat to your own digital yard where you are the master of your domain.

If Facebook or Instagram wants to be family-friendly, it can apply the kind of constitutionally valid decency rules that govern broadcast media. If a social-media platform wants to be more edgy like Twitter, it can warn users that, for example, pornographic content is permitted. But in any case, the cardinal principle should be a viewpoint of neutrality.

But what should be is not what is and it won’t be as long as the Cancel Culture forces boycotts on social media and dictating speech by bankrupting online platforms that they do not agree with on a political level.

Did you ever get the feeling all those "virtuous victim signalers" were actually a bunch of psychopaths, manipulators, and narcissists? Well, it looks like you were right.



Onward and upward,
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