I would be tempted to characterize this recent development regarding Matt Orfalea’s mashup as surreal, except it has become business as usual for those who strive control what you see, often with the encouragement and direction of the U.S. government. You see, Orfalea’s video must be demonetized because it is “suitable.” Dozens of unsubtle interventions like this over the past few years led Noam Chomsky to recently comment “the “United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing and, which in fact, go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.” Bottom line: it is now inappropriate to accurately quote prominent Democrats. Thank you, Google, for financially-gagging content creators who honor the facts. Matt Taibbi describes this recent Youtube/Google defunding of Orfalea (who once worked for Bernie Sanders) as follows:
Today we’re releasing a video Matt Orfalea has been working on, showing years of audio and video clips, tweets, and headlines in which Democratic Party politicians and media figures describe Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate. Before it was even published on this site, Matt received the above notice.
I’d like to thank YouTube for making our point. The material in this video does not promote the idea that any election was stolen or illegitimate. On the contrary, it shows a great mass of comments from Democratic partisans and pundits who themselves make that claim, about the 2016 election. Those comments were not censored or suppressed when made the first time around, by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, Adam Schiff, Rob Reiner, Tom Arnold, and Chris Hayes, among many others.
Nor did any platform step in to issue warnings when my former boss, Keith Olbermann, promised with regard to Trump’s ascension to the White House, “It will not be a peaceful transfer of power.”
However, the decision to assemble these materials in one place, inviting audiences to consider their meaning, apparently crosses a line. Now we know: you can deny election results on a platform like YouTube as much as you want, you can even promise disruption, but drawing attention to such behavior angers the algorithm. It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the double-standard in content moderation.
Tabbi’s recent article: “Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election.”
These campaigns were two sides of the same coin. Trump raised doubts about the reliability of mail-in votes, and admonished supporters ahead of time that a Trump loss should be understood as a fix. Meanwhile, Democrats and media figures — as well as a seemingly endless succession of named and unnamed intelligence sources — argued Russians were bent on corrupting the vote. Hillary Clinton went so far as to say Joe Biden shouldn’t concede “under any circumstances.”
