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Switching Platforms
Ever since the censorship bug infected Facebook we’ve seen the big media gatekeepers toss aside freedom like a hot potato. We have plenty of alternatives for social media – ditch Facebook for Gab, Twitter for Parler – but for those of us with web domains and email campaigns it gets a little tricky. Mailchimp and MailerLite started de-platforming organizations back in July when certain organizations dared question Covid data. Now, WordPress is threatening to cancel conservative websites, and Shopify is towing the communist party line.
There are plenty of alternatives for Mailchimp, WordPress, and Shopify as well, but how can we know if they stand for free-speech if they don’t wear it on their sleeve? Does anyone have insight about which companies, services, or platforms stand for free speech?
Published in General
It is important to distinguish that WordPress means multiple things:
The problem is that people seem to want the isolation because that provides a feeling of community and commonality. Unfortunately the internet tends to distill and concentrate those feelings.
Tara Burton documents this well in her book Strange Rites, which I reviewed here last year.
https://ricochet.com/770718/book-review-strange-rites-new-religions-for-a-godless-world/
A degree of social unity used to be ensured by common “news” when Americans all got their information from the Big Three TV networks and every newspaper looked to The New York Times for topics. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.
The best chance of getting the two sides to constantly communicate is common schooling. But Republicans surrendered public schools by preserving the Department of Education.
Sadly, force has always been necessary to keep greatly opposed groups talking to each other. We form and maintain associations with unlike people in schools, in work, in worship, etc. But all of those environments now either bend over backward to avoid heated debates or actively suppress dissent from one worldview.
Unity is a difficult, infuriating, exhausting pursuit that few people have the constitution, discipline, or interest to commit to. Most people must be “stuck” with opponents to persist in debates and hope. Now even conservatives commonly abandon family bonds.
Maybe renewal of permanent family commitments is the best focus for persistent engagement. Family is the most basic building block of any society. It is the most basic form of society.
Sorry for derailing the conversation, Vince. I’ll do some research on web hosting.
Havel had quite a bit to say about that.
And I would tend toward “if you’re willing to bow to the mob enough to hang that sign in your shop window, then I’m not sure you can be trusted.”
Many articles cite Epik as a reliable host of “rightwing extremists” content. It sounds like a recommendation. Gab is hosted by Epik.
The corporate media will claim anything is “right-wing extremist racist sexist bigoted xenophobic anti-Semitic” if it threatens their dominance.
I tend to agree, but I do have empathy for those who do not feel they can take a stand.
Cool, I hadn’t heard of Rumble….thx
BitChute and Vimeo are the other popular alternatives. I watch YouTube mostly on my TV. Unfortunately, the Rumble app for Roku is limited compared to the YouTube app. YouTube continues to host many channels critical of itself and of the left.
My memory, which may or may not be accurate here, tells me that the hosting company is Astroluxe.
Our friends at Amazon are in somewhat of a bind. They are asking federal regulators to let them ban some shareholder proposals from their proxy statement (to shareholders in advance of their annual meeting). It seems that the usual suspects are proposing that Amazon provide reports on their efforts to ban such things as “hate speech” and “bigotry” from their site (i.e. prohibit books that are defined, by them, as hateful, bigoted, or inciting violence). Amazon is looking to not accept those proposals. They are trying, as expected, to have it both ways. It will be interesting to see what the feds do.
They’ll do whatever the most generous lobbyists ask of them.
One of the Ricochet videos this week was about how Ricochet is hosted by a company co-owned by Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review fame. So there’s that.
Ricochet uses WordPress under WordPress’ Terms of Service, which, like most, are probably unilaterally changeable by WordPress.
ToS bans hate, you’re forbidden to use WP to promote hate, you’re on SPLC’s hate list, you no longer are licensed to use the software, lower case o goes away.
One should make an app that rates companies, businesses and sites by their political leanings. That way both sides know who to support and harass.
There is one called BuyPartisan. When you’re out shopping, use it scan the UPC code of the product, and it looks up the manufacturer and their political contributions. I tried it aways back, didn’t work all that well, and we don’t do enough physical shopping nowadays for it to matter.
A couple of weeks ago, at my favorite grocery store, I bought a box of Goya Mexican Rice mix. It was great, and yesterday I was at the store, and decided to buy another box. When I got to the shelves of Mexican food, I found NO Goya products at all. The store seems to have pulled all their mixes and ingredients from their shelves.
On the news yesterday, we saw a story about the CEO of Goya Foods being censured by his board of directors. He has said that he will not make any political statements now (he was a big Trump supporter). Is he the next candidate for Cancellation? How long until he is fired? How long until the company goes bankrupt, when no stores will carry their products? This is evil.
Yes it is evil.
On Monday or Tuesday, I watched a clip of some Talking Heads, wailing in to their microphones, that the Right is now hell bent on pointing out how very much the Left wants to eliminate us. How dare we mention this?
Plus they love us, right?
I mean, after all, didn’t the Left recently ask us to consider unification with them? Except now that we are so Whack that we are daring to say out loud that they want to persecute us and possibly eliminate us, well, now ll deals are off. Our protests are enough to indicate that we should be eliminated.
We are hosted by Astroluxue, which is co-owned by NRO Editor Charlie Cooke. We discussed this in great detail here.
And my channel, not directly critical of the left, but full of stuff the left doesn’t usually like–Augustine, Confucius, a proper understanding of Plato’s Republic.
(Yes, this is just shameless self-promotion.)
They have a disproportionate presence due to the fact that they are the easiest targets, similar to the situation with Bitchute; that disproportionate presence is likely to be somewhat lessened now that Gab has received an influx of refugees from Parler.
That said, BLM supporters are on the same moral plane as anti-Semites, so any viable social media ‘platform’ is going to have horrible people espousing reprehensible views, that one has to actively block or ignore-the only difference is that the Big Tech sites actively collude to suppress conservative viewpoints under the guise of suppressing ‘hate speech’, while alt-tech tolerates any viewpoint that has a market demand.
YouTube has been censoring PragerU videos for years, but I’ve noticed most of the channels I watch are hyper-sensitive about the words they use in the last few weeks, opting for saying “45” instead of “Trump,” or “shenanigans” instead of “fraud” etc…
Not a fan of deplatforming- but Sydney Powell’s newsletter is the kind of thing you expect in one of those waiting rooms from hell scenarios- you know long wait, no WiFi, weak cellphone reception and all the magazines are 3 years old or Teen Vogue etc
You obviously use the same ophthalmologist as me.
I’d like to know what one of the only people standing up for election integrity is doing. That pretty much goes for anyone the communists are silencing: I want to hear what they don’t want me to hear.
I just now signed up for her newsletter on her website. I hope she finds a way to email it to me.
She didn’t stand up for election integrity- her clown show operation is one of the greatest impediments to getting real reform. Her antics and sleazy PR stunts (claiming she had proof on the courtroom steps but failing to even try proving them in court as in WI) discredited people advancing genuine concerns and policies to improve election integrity. She set back conservative attempts at election reform by, at least, years. She is to election reform what Sid Blumenthal was to journalistic integrity. We have real problems with our elections but her unethical behavior only aided the left in avoiding the issues.
We will see. There is no doubt that the media hate her. Her behavior during the election does raise some eyebrows, but given her previous record I will give her enough benefit of the doubt to let her explain herself before jumping to such conclusions.
She and Rudy are very busy being sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion Voting Systems.