There’s been a storm brewing all year on social media and this week it hit with a vengeance. Wave after wave of protest has lashed the ocean liners Twitter, Youtube, Apple, and Facebook after controversial passengers were forcibly ejected for speaking out of turn. As the censorship cyclone has intensified, cryptocurrency users have begun fleeing to safer havens, with Mastodon and Gab the leading the charge.
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Censorship Aboard the Good Ship Social Media
For the left, the right, and everyone caught in the middle, it’s been a wild seven days on social media. Trouble has been fomenting for months, but it hit fever pitch with the permabanning of the right’s most notorious agent provocateur. Alexander Emric Jones, better known as Alex Jones, was effectively booted from the internet without warning in a pincer movement orchestrated by Apple, Spotify, and Youtube, leaving the Infowars firebrand displaced and disenfranchised.
The left immediately began toasting his ousting, as the left are wont to do with designated enemy combatants who don’t accord to their worldview. The right countered, fighting for the Alex Joneses of the world to be allowed to speak, regardless of how misinformed or offensive their views might be. On crypto Twitter, meanwhile, something that had been known for a long time was revisited with a sense of urgency: it is no longer safe to rely on tech giants for access to the internet.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, to his credit, refused to join the internet monopolies in forcibly ejecting Alex Jones, despite the usual howls of protest. In other cases, however, Twitter has been every bit as supine as its peers, shadow banning and temporary blocking users for
