Google to Conservative Website: Censor content or lose AdSense revenue | The Daily Dose – 9/1/2017

 

Google recently issued a chilling ultimatum to The Liberty Conservative website; Modify or remove your content or lose ad revenue.

The ‘warning’ was issued by Google on Tuesday regarding a post on the site written by James Allsup, former Liberty Conservative contributor and attendee of the now infamous Unite the Right ‘rally-turned-riot’ in Charlottesville, VA earlier this month. The website was informed that the post must be modified or removed to meet Google AdSense policies. According to Liberty Conservative’s Shane Trejo, the article focused on differences between the ‘Alt-Right’ and actual Nazis, and he states that the post “contained no offensive content”. Trejo insists that Google targeted the article not because of offensive content, but because of its offensive author; “just the fact that it was authored by a man deemed to be an ‘unperson’ by the corporate elite was enough for Google to target it for censorship”.

‘Due to financial constraints’, The Liberty Conservative has since complied with Google’s demand and removed the article from their website. 

As Trejo explains, “An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive”. He notes that rival ad platforms who ‘respect the intellectual freedom of their customers’ may outcompete Google one day, but that day has not yet arrived, and freedom of expression online is in a precarious position. “These tech companies have us all by the short hairs, and post-Charlottesville, they are all working in unison to enforce the Orwellian nightmare. Nobody is safe.”

The chilling reality of this Orwellian nightmare has been on full display in the weeks since the violence in Charlottesville. In the aftermath, tech companies certainly do appear to be working in unison to censor controversial content.

 On August 13, web hosting company GoDaddy announced that it had given neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer 24 hours to find a new host company after site founder Andrew Anglin posted an article on the site entitled ‘Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut. 

| Read PJ Media’s synopsis of Anglin’s article HERE | 

Following GoDaddy’s decision to refuse service to the website, other hosting companies followed suit, and Google ultimately cancelled the site’s domain name. Thus, The Daily Stormer is no more, forced to retreat to the ‘Dark Web’.

The Daily Stormer was a repugnant website and the piece Andrew Anglin wrote about Heather Heyer was nothing short of disgusting from start to finish; the delusional ravings of a despicable, hate-filled moron. Regardless of how awful the website’s content was, this sort of takedown and unified digital blacklisting of any website places freedom of expression online on a perilously slippery slope. If The Daily Stormer can be literally erased from the internet in a matter of days, then any website could potentially suffer the same fate.

 

With the recent partnering of tech giants Google, Apple, and Facebook with far-left activist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to censor ‘hate speech’ and ‘controversial’ content, it seems unlikely that the blacklisting will stop with truly hateful websites like The Daily Stormer.

Groups like the American College of Pediatrics and The Family Research Council have been labeled as ‘hate groups’ by the SPLC and placed on their ‘Hate Map‘ and the ADL has officially labeled ‘Pepe the Frog’ a ‘hate symbol’. Both of these groups have a long history of hysterically targeting and attacking any group (or cartoon frog, for that matter) that opposes their far-left social and political agenda. Both groups routinely muddy the waters between real hate groups like the KKK and traditional conservative groups like Liberty Council for just such a purpose.

With tech giants like Google handing over the reigns of the ‘hate-speech’ hunt to groups like the SPLC and ADL, what’s the likelihood that mainstream conservative websites won’t eventually be blacklisted? How long before they are all targeted for demonization or even denial of service because their views don’t conform to the far-left lunacy of the SPLC? Judging by Google’s strong-arm tactics against Liberty Conservative, that time may already be upon us.

 

YouTuber Dave Cullen shares his thoughts on Google’s content restrictions and how to push back against online censorship.

Dave Cullen | Computing Forever on YouTube

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

| Salman Rushdie |