Roman general Vegetius wrote in Epitoma Rei Militaris: “Sic vis pacem para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war). The well-known paradox has evolved centuries later, most notably in the doublespeak from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” Today, the Red Guard cartel – an alliance of big tech, the mainstream media, and progressive activists – has ostensibly adopted a new maxim: To have free speech, you must embrace censorship. The product lines of social media giants have instituted this philosophy into their business models, and they are flaunting the contradiction in the free-speech-loving public’s face.
YouTube Awards YouTube an Award
In an event sponsored by Google’s video platform, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was awarded the Freedom Forum Institute’s Free Expression Award. The digital awards ceremony, comparable to something out of the Soviet Union, saw video creator Molly Burke praise Wojcicki by calling her a free-speech champion.
Wojcicki attempted to gaslight the public with an acceptance speech that was ironic, revealing how much the platform has censored content and users under the guise of free expression.
“The freedoms we have, we really can’t take for granted. We really have to make sure we’re protecting them in every way possible,” she said, adding that the website has removed nine million videos in the first quarter.
“We also need to make sure there are limits,” Wojcicki stated. “A lot of content that technically meets the spirit of what we’re trying to do, but it is borderline, and so for that content we will just reduce – meaning we’re not going to recommend it to our users.”
The ceremony’s video was posted on April 15. Since then, it has had nearly 6,000 views and 2,200 dislikes – and counting. Surprisingly, YouTube has yet to disable the comments section since the remarks are brutal. The comments can be summarized in this one from user Red Diver: “Orwell is laughing from the grave at this irony.”
The Red Scare of YouTube
While YouTube was certainly a gamechanger in the video platform realm when it was first established 15 years ago, the website has metastasized into a venue of memory holes, purges, and censorship.
From former President Donald Trump to One America News Network (OANN) to Stefan Molyneux, many parties have fallen victim to the web-based hammer. YouTube has also become a partner of the President Joe Biden administration, choosing to conceal the number of dislikes a White House video receives. But this should have been widely expected since the big tech-Democratic Party love affair is America’s worst-kept secret.
[youtube-subscribe align=”left”] YouTube has experienced a dramatic shift since its infancy. It no longer values independent content creators unless they check off one of the diversity boxes and hold an opinion on the 3×5 card of allowable expression. In recent years, the company has concentrated on featuring content from the mainstream media, late-night talk shows, and Hollywood powerhouses. It is rare for newcomers to make it big on YouTube unless they have the backing from the platform’s head honchos.
Go Broadcast Yourself
Whenever the right is cast off like a leper, the left suddenly champions the rights of companies, arguing that private businesses have the right to do whatever they wish. It is true: YouTube can censor, purge, and memory-hole anything and anyone it wants in the same way that it can award itself a free-expression badge. Does this make it ethical? Perhaps not. Let’s hope that the left can apply the same intellectual honesty to stores that do not want to serve specific segments of the population.
Progressives also urge conservatives and libertarians to build their own YouTube alternatives, which is something they have done, with Rumble and BitChute. For now, YouTube is too big and too ubiquitous to be taken down by David’s shepherd sling. It seems Americans have accepted YouTube as their digital content overlord and keep binging on cat videos, Screen Rant’s Pitch Meetings, and MLB highlights.
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Read more from Andrew Moran.
