Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Once again, it seems as if the freedom movement has found another obstacle in advancing individual liberty. This time it comes from the very tools that should be helping us spread our message. The Social Media companies are once again trying to censor the speech of conservatives and libertarians. Last year I wrote an article titled “The Fall of Social Media” where I discussed the ramifications of social media companies who chose to censor their users.

First there was Twitter who permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos because of some whiney actress that didn’t know how to handle internet trolls. Then there was Facebook who has been arbitrarily shutting down pages of libertarians, conservatives and anyone else that may have unpopular views. Now Facebook is going after what they call fake news advertisements, which many blame for Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 Election. Yeah, I’m sure it wasn’t because Hilary Clinton was an unlikeable candidate that never seemed to have any real solutions to America’s ills. It was because of some fake news site that spread false information. I suppose that this line of thinking shouldn’t come as any surprise since Facebook’s CEO and co-creator Mark Zuckerberg has advocated some nonsense about creating an Universal Income. I can never comprehend how someone like Zuckerberg who was intelligent enough to create something that so many people around the world have made part of their daily lives, can believe in something as economically absurd as an Universal Income. Considering how arbitrary they are about shutting down politically incorrect pages, I can’t imagine them being any better at distinguishing between news that is legitimate or fake.

Then we have Google, who throughout its history has colluded with totalitarian governments who want to control what their people see on the internet. They have also shown bias against sites that support the Second Amendment, by making sure that whenever somebody uses their search engine to look up subjects such as gun control or the Second Amendment they always make sure that it is the anti-gun sites that show up in the top results. Even more recent, there was controversy when Google fired a software engineer when he wrote a manifesto in response to the company’s memo about diversity, where he said that the disparity between men and women in the company had more to do with biological differences, than discrimination. Despite this notion being backed up by years of studies, the higher ups decided to fire him with extreme prejudice. There were some who didn’t even want to let him back into the building to empty his desk, as if he was using company resources to traffic underage prostitutes.

With that mindset it shouldn’t be at all surprising that Google has been targeting users who produce politically incorrect content on YouTube. Recently companies who use YouTube for advertising, have taken issue with the content of the videos that their ads have appeared on. Google, who owns YouTube, decided to crack down on users that produce controversial content by either demonetizing their videos, which prevents them from receiving ad revenue or in some cases banning them outright. Now, let me be clear about what I mean by politically incorrect. I am not talking about “This Week in Holocaust Denial with Adolf Eichmann Jr.” (Yes, I made that up). I am talking about videos that bash Social Justice Warriors, which shouldn’t be all that surprising considering how Google treats employees who aren’t down with the Social Justice cause.

The problem is that they aren’t just targeting the most inflammatory of anti-Social Justice videos. They are targeting people such as Dave Rubin, a former co-host of The Young Turks, who is also gay and calls himself a Classical Liberal who decided to distance himself from the left when he found out how intolerant they were to other viewpoints. Rubin is probably the nicest of the anti-SJW crowd, yet he has found his videos demonetized. We also have an Anarcho-Capitalist YouTuber that goes by the name of Mr. Dapperton, who has found that just about every video on his channel was demonetized. He has made his own share of anti-SJW videos, but even the videos that have nothing to do with that subject have been prevented from receiving ad revenue. To prove this point Dapperton made a video where he talked about how he loved rainbows, puppies and kittens, only to find that video demonetized as well.

It became even clearer, when I learned that Google had hired members of the Anti-Defamation League to determine which videos are too offensive for monetization. Despite the organization calling itself the Anti-Defamation league, defamation is the very tactic that this organization uses against right-wing groups that they don’t like, in a similar fashion as the Southern Poverty Law Center. On top of that they are so hypersensitive that they see anti-Semitism in just about everything, which probably includes the videos that they helped flag.

Now that I pointed out the problem, let us talk about the solution. I know that some of you are going to remind me that Google and Facebook are private companies who can write their own rules of conduct. Putting aside that they are both corporations that receive subsidiaries from the government, they are also companies that advertise themselves as places you can go to express yourself freely. As Milo Yiannopoulos once pointed out, when you advertise your website as a place of free expression only to create a series of arbitrary rules that makes it difficult if not impossible for one to express himself, it amounts to nothing more than false advertising. So, what are our options? Find another social media site. Just because Facebook and YouTube are the most dominate of the social media platforms, it doesn’t mean that they are the only party in town. What we need to do is find these sites, set up pages there and encourage others to do the same. I am not just talking about other libertarians, conservatives or any other member of the freedom movement. I am talking about others who have fallen victim to the same policies set up by these companies. If you make it too hard for someone to express themselves on your site, then people will go elsewhere for their social media needs. Once that happens all the companies who use the sites for advertisement will pull out as well. The only way to put these arrogant corporations in their place is to hit them where it hurts most. Their wallets. We need to remind them of how easy it is for a social media site to become another MySpace.