Censorship Via Revenue Strangulation

The biggest battle facing conservatives right now is the suppression of free speech by the leftists who control the public square — i.e., social media platforms.

I began an article on July 2 with those same words, though that analysis was about the Supreme Court’s free speech decision in a combined case regarding laws in Florida and Texas. This time, I mention the big battle because of congressional hearings on the suppression of conservative speech via strangulation of ad revenue.

Yesterday’s testimony from Daily Wire cofounder Ben Shapiro got a lot of the attention, and for good reason, as his takedown of Democrat Eric Swalwell should go down in the annals of congressional hilarity. One example came when Swalwell produced a poster of a 2018 Shapiro quote about homosexuality: “Yes, I’m a religious Jew. You found me out,” Shapiro said. “I agree with me. Yes, that’s true.” Pure gold.

But that amusement ride is not the point here. In fact, Swalwell’s entire intent was to distract from the point, which is that his fellow “progressive” radical leftists are speech suppressors of the first order.

The House Judiciary Committee’s hearing focused on its 39-page report on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. The report’s Executive Summary explains, “Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations participated in boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members. This collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.”

Put more simply, leftists are using censorship to cut off revenue sources for conservative media sites that depend on advertising — which is virtually all of them. Here, I feel compelled to toot our own horn: Since 1996, we have not taken advertising, instead relying on the voluntary support of readers like you. That decision was more prescient than we realized.

Here’s how GARM works. In 2019, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), of which roughly 90% of global advertisers are a part, established GARM, which the House report says “includes every major advertising agency holding company in its ranks.” The World Economic Forum also adopted GARM, extending the reach of this collusion.

NewsGuard, one of our least favorite “fact-checking” outfits, is a part of this operation by virtue of “grading” news sites for meeting Approved™ standards. The Patriot Post and a host of other conservative sites don’t get high grades — often lower than ChiCom propaganda outlets, in fact — though habitual purveyors of fake news like CNN, USA Today, and BuzzFeed do quite well. In a recent video, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit explains NewsGuard’s operation quite well.

GARM works to achieve “brand safety” by ensuring that companies “don’t inadvertently support” unapproved viewpoints. In fact, the report says, “Colluding to suppress voices and views disfavored by the leading marketers at the world’s largest companies and advertising agencies is core to GARM’s founding principles.” As Shapiro put it in an article almost a year ago, “If you publish content that violates [GARM’s] guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.”

According to the House report, that’s exactly what’s happening: “GARM’s monetization work has the effect of influencing what content appears online,” and GARM has a decidedly anti-American, anti-Liberty approach. The report demonstrates this through specific examples of demonetization of various websites or podcasters because of particular things they wrote or said.

You won’t be surprised by the triggers for this army of “fact-checkers” and gatekeepers. Statements of fact or even opinion can be demonetized if they diverge from the Left’s Narrative™ on COVID vaccines, the virus’s origin, and Hunter Biden’s laptop, as well as a range of cult issues from climate change to gender.

I mentioned that we don’t take advertising, but that doesn’t inoculate us from this censorship. For example, Facebook relies on “independent third-party fact-checkers” to determine its algorithmic content suppression. Its suppression of our content to 750,000 followers has severely squelched Patriot Post website traffic and subscriptions coming from Facebook. It’s a similar story with email delivery because sometimes Big Tech companies simply don’t allow our emails to get to your inbox. (Check your spam folder and follow these steps to help ensure delivery.)

Less traffic, fewer subscribers, and undelivered emails almost certainly mean reduced revenue, though it’s awfully hard to quantify what might have been. Throw in Joe Biden’s economy, and our fundraising has gotten tougher.

The Judiciary Committee’s report concludes that the problem isn’t that left-wingers don’t want to fund right-wingers. Consumers and companies alike are free to make those decisions, and they do every day. “Unilateral actions are not illegal,” says the report. The legal issues arise because of the collusion.

“Collusion in the advertising space is … the only way to guarantee that no individual conspirator takes advantage of the artificial changes in what would otherwise be a free market for advertising space to reach consumers,” the report says. “Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court described collusion as ‘the supreme evil of antitrust[.]’ Today, this description remains true. If collusion among powerful corporations capable of collectively demonetizing, and in effect eliminating, certain views and voices is allowed to continue, the ability of countless American consumers to choose what to read and listen to, or even have their speech or writing reach other Americans, will be destroyed.”

That, of course, is the point. Leftists are no longer liberal defenders of free speech but are instead virtual jackbooted thugs stifling the free exchange of ideas. This collusion includes the White House, which the Judiciary Committee notes leaned on Facebook regarding algorithmic suppression. The Supreme Court whiffed on stopping that collusion.

In any case, make no mistake: The biggest threat to Liberty in America today is left-wing censorship.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/108377-censorship-via-revenue-strangulation-2024-07-11

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