Tag: #AltTech

It took just over one year for Andrew Torba to climb down from his untenable high horse of “free speech uber alles”:

Andrew Torba @a
This is unacceptable and we have taken action against this account. Targeting individuals with threatening language and behavior behind an anonymous account is cowardly and foolish. Users that do this will face accountability from Gab. 

Whatever happened to “suck it up, crybaby?” What a hypocritical moron. This is why Gab is doomed to failure. You simply can’t expect an organization to succeed, let alone a startup, when it is run by someone as immature, hot-headed, and totally unable to anticipate the obvious as Torba.

Andrew Torba @a
I don’t want to hear it from the people who want to play semantic games about what is actually a threat and what isn’t. The intent here is very clear and aimed at a specific individual user. It’s malicious and designed to terrorize someone into silence. The person who recieved these (and many more,) did feel threatened and did contact us about it.

Of course he doesn’t want to hear from everyone who is capable of remembering his oft-expressed previous position from all of six months ago. Gab is a train wreck in a dumpster fire and it will never be capable of becoming a genuine alternative to Twitter. My only regret is that I didn’t continue to ignore Torba when he was lobbying Spacebunny to get me to pay attention to his emails.

Thanks to Oneway’s brilliant ongoing developments, Infogalactic will soon be offering a Twitter alternative that will actually work in the not-very-distant future. And no, we will not be promising free speech to social rejects and retards, to the contrary, we promise to clamp down relentlessly and remorselessly on all social media jackassery, trollery, and bantz because we are more than happy to leave that time-wasting, mind-numbing gamma nonsense to Gab and whatever other sites wish to cater to the unpleasant and the unproductive.

Further evidence of the complete inutility of virtue-signaling. It will not save you once you have been targeted for deplatforming.

Killstream is known for both its controversial guests and similarly toxic chat. Users have been known to take advantage of YouTube’s Super Chat system to buy and pin toxic messages in the live chat, further defaming the stream’s reputation.

This prompted show host Ethan Ralph to fight back by holding a charity stream to benefit St. Jude’s, a research hospital for children with catastrophic diseases. However, YouTube’s new policy on harmful Super Chats has caused a major rift between Ralph and the platform, as well as the Wall Street Journal – which he is now accusing of taking money away from sick children.

Ralph claims that an upcoming article from the Wall Street Journal pressured YouTube into taking action against his stream, causing the company to cancel over $26,000 in donations, which St. Jude’s is now reportedly refunding.

An email taken from a journalist at the WSJ claims that the Ralph Retort livestream is featured in an upcoming piece, which will detail how the alt-right is using YouTube’s Super Chat function to spread to ‘problematic’ ideology.

Of course what the Wall Street Journal did was wrong. Of course it was ridiculous that St. Jude’s refused the donation. Of course it is wrong for YouTube to deplatform Ethan.

What about any of this is even remotely a surprise? Stop virtue-signaling. Stop trying to appease those who hate you. Start utilizing independent platforms and concentrate on supporting those who are doing the same.

From Infogalactic to Castalia House, we are actively working on this. That’s why Castalia House Direct exists, that’s why we are considering the best way to offer an alternative to Kindle Unlimited, and that’s why Voxiversity and the Darkstream are on BitChute instead of relying solely on the vagaries of YouTube’s Trust and Safety Council or whatever they call their thought police. We’re also working on other projects about which we have not yet said anything.

But we can’t make anyone stop using Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube. All we can do is offer an alternative.

Don’t complain about being deplatformed, build your own damn platforms!

Facebook has started banning both individual accounts and pages, as well as associated groups, that are affiliated with the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. The news was first reported today by Business Insider, which noted that members of the Proud Boys and adjacent online communities had begun complaining about the takedowns on Twitter.

The removals come in response to an act of violence in New York City earlier this month, in which members of the Proud Boys assaulted anti-fascist protestors outside a Republican club in Manhattan where Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, also an original co-founder of Vice Media, was speaking. Facebook confirmed to The Verge that it was banning Proud Boys members and affiliated groups and pages from both its main social network and from Instagram. McInnes’ personal page is still active, but a number of high-profile groups, pages, and accounts have begun to disappear today.

“Our team continues to study trends in organized hate and hate speech and works with partners to better understand hate organizations as they evolve,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We ban these organizations and individuals from our platforms and also remove all praise and support when we become aware of it. We will continue to review content, Pages, and people that violate our policies, take action against hate speech and hate organizations to help keep our community safe.” The company is citing violations of its rules on hate speech and the organizing of groups that spread hate both online and offline as the reason for the bans and removals.

The social media giants need conservatives and other right-wingers on their sites more than we need to be on them. We have repeatedly demonstrated that. The Darkstream has become popular enough that YouTube is now throttling recommended videos there and it is probably only a matter of time before that channel is deplatformed, which is why it has been on BitChute for the last few months.

People follow content, not platforms. Platforms are worthless without content. Yes, a change of platform will reduce one’s audience, but the part of the audience lost, the part that can’t bother to follow you to the new platform, is the trivial and largely irrelevant part. I’d rather have 2,500 staunch followers than 250,000 casual fans. Being deplatformed from Twitter and losing my 33k followers there did not harm me or slow me down in the slightest. I’ve never used Facebook for anything important. This blog is already backed up in multiple locations and we will not even break stride if Google forces Blogger to shut it down… although you should subscribe to either Castalia Book Club or the Daily Meme Wars to be alerted to the new site when the time comes.

When, not if.

Everyone needs to stop expecting fairness from their self-declared enemies or thinking that cucking just a little will cause them to spare you. If the next wave of deplatformings doesn’t affect you, then the one that follows the social media giants’ fury and despair when the Blue Wave fails to appear very well may.

Add GoDaddy to the list of corporations deplatforming Gab:

Gab, the far-right social network that the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at Pittsburgh synagogue used to share anti-Semitic posts, has gone offline after GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to find a new domain provider. GoDaddy’s decision comes after PayPal, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent banned Gab’s accounts over the weekend.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t find this extremely amusing, or that I did not anticipate this result when Andrew Torba refused to remove libel, pornography, and fake rape photoshops from his site at my request. As I said more than a year ago, Torba lacks the temperament and the detachment required to run a company, particularly in testing times such as these. But the Gab deplatforming is merely a minor symptom of the real problem, which has been decades in the making.

As I mentioned in the Darkstream last night, what these corporations are doing is literally destroying the basis for a developed economy. And not only what they are doing now, but what they have been in the process of doing for the past 15 years. The EULAs, the Terms of Service, and the selling of software of a service, and the SJW convergence have all collectively routed around the rule of law which is necessary for sustained economic growth over time.

In countries with strong rule of law:

1. Property rights over land, equipment, and personal items are clear and protected by law.
3. Contracts between people, businesses, and the government are effectively enforced by the legal system.
3. Political accountability is high and corruption is low.
4. Business regulations are clear and enforced in a transparent manner.

In such environments people make long-term investments and build large organizations. In contrast, if the property rights and contracts are not enforced and the business regulations are not clear, most of the economy consists of small family owned firms with little modern equipment. A high-tech, prosperous economy would not develop.

Effectively, there are no contracts anymore in the digital economy. There is no predictability anymore. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There are no requirements for performance anymore. In sum, the US digital economy is rapidly becoming the equivalent of a third-world economy, complete with crony capitalism and digital robber barons.

Gab is discovering that its firm and unshakable commitment to free speech – which is to say its foolish decision to freely permit unrestrained libel and pornography – is simply not tenable:

In the last two weeks both of our payment processors have threatened to or have frozen our service. This is why we are crowdfunding from You, The People, to build our own free speech-friendly infrastructure.

Paypal did not terminate our service–yet. They threatened to a few weeks ago over a meme from 2012 called “Navy Seal Copypasta.” They took the meme literally like idiots who know nothing at all about basic internet culture. We refused to censor the meme because the context and intent were very clear. We have not heard back since we told them this 11 days ago and our account is still active as of now.

Stripe, our other payment processor, is demanding quote:

“Modification of your terms of service to indicate that adult or illegal content cannot be streamed through GabTV or otherwise distributed through the Gab service. The implementation of reasonable controls to ensure that no adult or illegal content is being streamed through GabTV or otherwise available on the Gab service.”

You may recall that I long ago warned Andrew Torba he was absolutely going to have to rein in the slanderers and the trolls, and not because Spacebunny and I were being targeted by the Alt-Reich nasties. Instead, he very publicly chose to embrace them in the name of Free Speech. So, I have no sympathy for Gab whatsoever; unlike others whose accounts have been terminated by the payment processors for dubious reasons, Gab has been in open and avowed violation of their terms of service almost from the start.

Hell, I quit using Gab for precisely the same reason that Stripe is now refusing them service. They were refusing to moderate photoshopped images of gang rape, just to give one example. And as I said at the time, Torba is temperamentally unsuited to run a business and is totally unready for prime time. His childish response to Paypal and Stripe again demonstrates both.

It’s somewhat of a mystery why conservatives are willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns, but refuse to simply build a viable alternative infrastructure. Don’t whine, cry, bitch, or complain about these things, roll up your sleeves and help build the alternative platforms and organizations!

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

What we have to understand is that if Pewdiepie is not important enough to the platform providers,  nobody is. If Alex Jones is not important enough to the platform providers, nobody is, and that means we have to always be ready to build the platform. We have to build our own platforms, and now maybe I made a mistake a couple years ago in focusing first on replacing Wikipedia. You know, I always have a strategic perspective, maybe sometimes it’s an excessively strategic perspective, but we chose to do Infogalactic first because it was one of the more challenging ones. Twitter, one of these will pop up left right and center. YouTube is difficult because of the way that it’s run at such huge losses. Facebook, you know, we figured it’s doable but a lot of people were also attempting to do that

Now if you look at Oneway, you can see how easy it was for them to have a Twitter functionality yeah there was Freez Peach there was all kinds of stuff, so with Infogalactic what was important to us was making sure that people had a non-SJW-controlled information source and now we do. We haven’t started really pushing it yet because our functionality is not yet different, but the important thing is you need to always be ready. The Darkstream is already on BitChute; most of the the archived videos are already on BitChute, we only really bothered with the last two months or so, you know, that’s kind of when we found our our groove as it were, but we’re ready.

 If you’re listening to this and you’re not subscribed to the BitChute Darkstream channel I would encourage you to do so, because we don’t know how long YouTube is going to permit me to stream. They might leave me indefinitely, you know, I have a small audience and it’s quite possible that they’ve decided the press attention that it would give me would actually be worse than just letting me continue with my three, six, ten thousand whatever subscribers. It’s very clear that they are primarily concerned about the people with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, for the most part, but this thought policing is not going to stop!

There are some who are theorizing that this is only taking place in preparation for the midterm elections, and that once the midterm elections are done and it’s not possible for the big social media influencers to affect the election in any way that they’ll ease up and that sort of thing, but the reality is that they’re not going to ease up. Because they’re going to be very disappointed when the long-prophesied Blue Wave does not arrive, when they realize that the 2018 elections indicate that Trump has overperformed and is almost certain to be reelected in 2020. I believe that we are  going to see the SJW-controlled Left go completely berserk after their  disappointment from the 2018 midterms, and so this isn’t going to stop, and it’s important – I stress again, it’s important – for the Right to be thinking actively in terms of building and supporting infrastructure.

I am rolling my eyes at the hysterics that have greeted the news that YouTube has banned the Infowars channel in coordination with Apple and Spotify banning its podcasts and Facebook banning its Facebook page.

Paul Joseph Watson✔@PrisonPlanet
The Alex Jones Channel has been permanently DELETED by YouTube. This is a coordinated PURGE. This is political censorship.

Paul Joseph Watson✔@PrisonPlanet
Apple, Spotify, Facebook and now Google (which owns YouTube) – all within 12 hours of each other. A coordinated purge. This is a total abuse of power.

BFD and book-freaking-hoo. When Alex asked me what the next step would be, I told him that they would be deplatforming the Right and attempting to defund it. This was not merely predictable, it was obvious. This is the exact opposite of a surprise. Complaining and crying about it will accomplish precisely nothing.

This is why we have to build our own platforms, as I have been advising for years. This is why you are shortsighted and strategically-challenged if you allow yourself to be dependent in any way on the platforms of your enemy, even if doing so maximizes your profits and is in your immediate short-term interests.

UPDATE: Before anyone starts worrying that I’ve been banned by Facebook, I deactivated my account myself. I would have deleted it, but the damned DELETE ACCOUNT page would not load no matter which browser I tried. I’ll delete it when I get the chance.

Megan Fox covers the Stripe 180 on PJ Media:

Every time reports of conservatives being silenced on social media platforms come out, a large percentage of libertarians shout, “but private companies can serve whoever they want! Build your own platforms.” It is a constant criticism of anyone saying that social media and Silicon Valley need regulation or that political viewpoints need protection under the law. But when marginalized voices create their own platforms, the puppet masters of Silicon Valley who control all the infrastructure shut them down.

Vox Day, a contributor at BitChute and popular author of SJWs Always Double Down, told PJM, “The denial of payment services on ideological grounds is a significant blow to the libertarian idea that private companies can be permitted to operate without government oversight.” Day has significant experience being deplatformed on the major social media sites….

Stripe claimed in their notice of cancellation to Bitchute founder Ray Vahey that it was their “financial partners” who objected to Bitchute’s business model. “We are politically neutral, and have many creators from across the political spectrum,” Vahey told PJM. “Our site is still operational in terms of video streaming, but we have not been able to accept money since the Stripe termination,” he explained. “They gave us only 5 days notice, even though our account was in good standing and we had not broken any of their rules or laws or even had any customer complaints.”

The notice he received from Stripe was strange, filled with rambling excuses for termination with no specifics. Stripe employee “Gus” wrote:

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to overturn our decision regarding your account. Our financial partners have some fairly strict limitations on the type of businesses we can work with, and sadly your business type falls into a category which our financial partners consider to be high-risk. I’m truly sorry about that… this is a restriction imposed upon us directly from our financial partners, who use have [sic] an archaic and frankly antiquated view of non-traditional businesses.

Stripe refuses to say who the “financial partners” are. PJM also reached out to Stripe but received no response.

This tends to indicate the situation is as I suspected. Stripe is looking to cash in, so they are doing whatever their investors and prospective buyers want them to do. Which, in this case, is shutting down the services that allow people to bypass both the ideological gatekeepers as well as the financial gatekeepers.

It’s not an accident that they are attempting to shut down the crowdfunding sites, beginning with the alternative ones. That’s primarily what this is about. Rest assured, they have their sights on Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go too.

Two days ago, Christian Canadian commenter Faith Goldy was banned from Patreon. In my opinion, the egregious nature of this action makes it clear that it is time for everyone of the Right to STOP USING PATREON! Stop using it to raise money. Stop using it to give money. Stop using it, period.

It took almost two years, but even as powerful an organization as the NFL finally caved to the financial pressure of fans turning off the TV and refusing to buy tickets, which shows the power that comes from refusing to support the enemy. After facing less than one week of mass rejection, the production behind the horrible Show Dogs movie removed the pedophilic grooming scenes from the so-called “children’s film” and has apparently been removed by more than a few theater chains as well.

On the other hand, rumor has it that Disney is now planning to add a Show Dogs display at Disneyworld and Disneyland where children can be felt up by Mickey and Goofy as well as a Show Dogs on Ice tour.

That is why, if you support someone on Patreon, I suggest that you cancel that support and TELL the person you were supporting exactly why you did so. Encourage them to move to some other platform that is not converged and let them know that you will be happy to resume your support there.

There is no warning the Left. There is no fixing the Left. There is no way to productively work or partner with the Left. Leave it to dry up and die.Thanks for the info. All Patreon pledges of support cancelled.

UPDATE: Every journey begins with but a single step. A reader emails:

Thanks for the info. All Patreon pledges of support cancelled.

YouTube hits Infowars with a third strike preparatory to deleting Alex Jones’s channel:

After one strike was removed earlier in the week, YouTube hit the Alex Jones Channel with a third strike for a video that had already been appealed and restored.

In the video, Jones clearly explains how the victims of the Parkland shooting were not “crisis actors”.

YouTube’s flagging system is clearly being abused in a flagrant effort to shut down Infowars following a public campaign by CNN.

This sets a horrific precedent for free expression and the First Amendment and YouTube is in direct violation of the Communications Decency Act in adopting this approach.

Protest! Shock! Horror! Unfair! Come on, now. The inevitability of these deplatforming actions is why I have been repeatedly and relentlessly advising people to build their own platforms. There is little point in building up a highly fragile operation on your enemy’s turf that they can literally take out at will without warning.

The high-profile men and women of the Right absolutely need to stop thinking about maximizing their short-term benefit and start looking to support the platforms that are not going to a) silence them, b) sell them out, or, c) leave them completely exposed to their enemies. And they also need to stop “fighting for free speech”. Free speech is little more than anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda, which very few of its self-appointed defenders seem to know.

In case you haven’t noticed, it is utterly useless to appeal to the ideological purists who run these Big Social platforms. No amount of reason is going to sway them. So stop relying upon them! If you notice, I used Freestartr instead of Kickstarter and Bitchute instead of Youtube for Voxiversity. If even 10 percent of the Right would stop bitching and wailing and whining about their inevitable ill-treatment at the hands of the Left and publicly support the alternative platforms instead, we would have a fully functional Alt-Tech ecosystem before the end of 2018.

Stefan Molyneux clearly gets it. One hopes that others will before it’s already too late.

UPDATE: This again. I had a feeling someone was going to leap in to “call me out” for “hypocrisy” sooner or later. At least this was friendly concern.

This post being made on a Google-owned property, is at best hypocritical (which is fucking horrible to your credibility). Please take a look at platforms like Steemit, Minds, etc. because Goolag can bring the ban-hammer down on Vox Populi in a nanosecond. You’re a sonofabitch, but you’re an excellent sonofabitch, and I do not want to see you banned or discredited.

First, I was reliably informed that my credibility was destroyed back in 2001. So, who cares about that. Second, do you really think I am not prepared for Google to take down the blog without warning for no reason, or that Google does not know that? And third, Blogger is not a critical platform. It is merely a delivery vehicle for text on a screen and literally no one is dependent upon it.