Patrick Crozier, at Samizdata, bewails the action of Twitter in banning Instapundit:
…Reynolds is not a nutter. If they can ban him they can ban us all.
No no no no no [Brecht].
Twitter is not a public service funded by a benevolent World Socialist Government. It is a profit-making corporation. It makes and applies its own rules as it sees fit within its own virtual ‘premises’ and there’s sweet Felicity Arkwright that anyone can or should do about it.
Apart from voting with their mouse and taking their business elsewhere, of course. But he goes on:
Worse still, it is not as if Twitter is alone. It is remarkable how quickly internet stalwarts like Google, Facebook and Twitter have gone from being dynamic, “don’t be evil”, believers in freedom to being fully paid up members of the bansturbationary elite.
I have never trusted or used Google, whose cutesy rags-to-riches story is just a tad too Hollywoodesque to be believed, and I’ve never used the other two either. I don’t believe they were ever ‘on our side’.
Get a grip, man! If a huge, secretive corporation that wasn’t there last week and now knows everything about everyone claims repeatedly that it is “not evil”, what do we all think it is, children?
Mr. Crozier’s colleague Rob Fisher suggests the use of gab.ai as an alternative.
My points:
(1) It is entirely possible to establish online comms without having to ‘sign up’ to ‘social media’ at all. Here we are doing it.
(2) If Instapundit got hit by flak then there’s a good chance that it was right over the target at the time.
Propagoose 