The Censorship Continues

We now know that the federal government, led by the FBI, has engaged in a prolonged program of censorship that focused on social media. It began, as far as we know, during the Trump administration, and at that time was directed largely against the President. It has flourished during the Biden administration, in which the FBI and other agencies have acted as enforcers, suppressing dissent from the Biden administration’s line, whatever that might be at the moment. While this program of censorship has now been exposed, as far as we know, it continues.

That is the experience of PJ Media, where Paula Bolyard writes:

We thought censorship by Facebook and other social-media companies was bad, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Every week now I get an email showing which articles have been demonetized by Big Tech. If an article is demonetized, it means we can’t run ads on it. We still have to pay our writers for their work, but because we can’t run ads, we have to take a loss on it.

Demonetization is one of the techniques that social media platforms use, along with shadow banning, etc., to suppress facts and arguments that don’t support the Democratic Party line. Demonetization is effective against organizations that rely on social media traffic for revenue.

Here are some of the articles that have been demonetized just in the last three weeks:

I encourage you to read them. Foil the censors.

Study Suggests U.S. Government Lied About Myocarditis Risk From COVID Vax

Military Notes a Spike in Myocarditis Cases — Wonder Why?

Warning: Pfizer mRNA Flu Shots Are on the Way

Climate Crazies Have Discovered That Summertime Is Hot

Dems’ ‘Science Denier’ Accusation Is Old, Wrong, and Pathetic

How Many Thousands Did Corporate State Media COVID Misinformation Potentially Kill?

Personally, I doubt that covid vaccines have done a lot of harm, although they haven’t done a lot of good, either. On the other hand, I know for sure that the Left’s party line on global warming is 95% bullshit. But that isn’t the point. These and other important topics need to be debated freely.

Bolyard adds:

They’re essentially holding a gun to our head and saying, “Nice little website you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.” They’re leaving us with two choices: stop writing about these important topics, or keep on writing about them and lose money. They think squeezing us financially is how they’ll finally silence us. The Left doesn’t have good arguments on these topics, so they’re using the immense power they hold over the digital ad industry to shut us up.

Here at Power Line, we are something of a dinosaur. We have never depended on social media for traffic. If someone wants to link to us on Facebook or Twitter, great. But those links are not a significant source of traffic for us. We get ad revenue the old-fashioned way, by people coming to read us on the internet. (Twenty years ago, it would have been hard to imagine thinking of web surfing as “old-fashioned,” but these days, it is.)

Beyond that, we don’t depend on ad revenue for our livelihoods. Our revenue has, in fact, been cut roughly in half from its peak some years ago. That is mostly because of declining CPMs on the internet, and partly because of campaigns against us by leftists who try to discourage advertisers. We are not happy about that, but we aren’t going to shut up, either. We were advocating for conservatism long before there was any money in it, and we will continue regardless of whether there is any financial reward.

But not everyone is in that position, and many people foolishly (in my opinion) rely on social media to feed them news. So the government’s social media censorship is a vitally important issue.