The rise of financial blacklisting

01/13/2019

'When, oh when, are social media giants going to do more to combat hate speech?' The more important question is, though: 'Who gets to decide what is hate speech?' From YouTube and Twitter to Facebook and Patreon, Silicon Valley's answer seems to be: the kind of Social Justice Warriors who think any viewpoint to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn is literally Hitler.

So the battle lines for free speech in 2019 have been drawn: on the one side Silicon Valley and its authoritarian 'progressive' sympathizers everywhere from academe to the card payment processing industry; on the other, all those people who'd prefer the internet to be a place where they are free to make whatever jokes they like, express whatever viewpoint they like and fund whichever creatives they like, uncensored by the tech and finance worlds' self-appointed Witchfinders General.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson says: "I thought gigantic multinational corporations were the enemies of the radical left?"