Campus Reform Media Director Endorses Social Media Gulags for Conservatives
Tom Pappert
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Cabot Phillips, the media director for Campus Reform and former Marco Rubio stooge, decreed that conservatives must stop dickering about big tech systematically censoring prominent voices and submit themselves to the nearest social media gulag.
Over the course of several tweets, Phillips told conservatives that it is unbecoming to complain about massive social media giants appearing to collude in order to ban effective conservative voices during the aftermath of Facebook and Instagram’s decision to ban Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos from their platforms.
Yes, it’s incredibly hypocritical for them to portray themselves as free speech bastions, then censor views they don’t like.
HOWEVER, they built their product and the government should not be able to compel them to provide it to people against their will.
— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) May 3, 2019
He also made snotty remarks toward Watson and Infowars’ Kaitlin Bennett, who simply warned him his silence and complicity could easily make him the next target for a ban.
In one tweet, he mocked Watson for linking to his content in previous reports, revealing that he knew the exact number of times he received coveted attention from Infowars.
In another, Phillips snarkily informed Bennett that she and Infowars are not True Conservatives™.
I don't want or need the support of you and Alex Jones.
My message was to conservatives, y'all don't qualify. https://t.co/zPXFnr1ZMQ
— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) May 3, 2019
Ironically, it is Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the most mainstream and popular conservative in the Senate, who has outlined three possible solutions to end the plague of tech censorship against conservatives.
According to Life Site News, Cruz recommended revisiting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as one possible solution.
The first, he suggested, was reviewing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Cruz argued effectively grants platforms a “special immunity from liability” for the content they allow, predicated on the assumption that they are “neutral public forums” rather than publishers exercising subjective preferences.
“If Big Tech wants to be partisan and political speakers it has that right, but it has no entitlement to a special immunity from liability under Section 230 that The New York Times doesn’t enjoy, that The Washington Post doesn’t enjoy, that nobody else enjoys except for Big Tech,” Cruz noted.
As a second possible solution, Cruz pointed toward possible antitrust violations committed by the tech oligarchs.
“Applying the antitrust laws is complicated, but by any standard measure, the big tech companies are larger and more powerful than the Standard Oil was when it was broken up,” Cruz said. “They’re larger and more powerful than AT&T when it was broken up, and if we have tech companies using their monopoly to censor political speech, I think that raises real antitrust issues.”
Finally, Cruz explained that social media companies presenting themselves as bastions of free speech and expression then banning users for their political views could represent widespread fraud.
The third remedy Cruz suggested would be exploring whether biased enforcement of what most users assume to be neutral and open forums constitutes fraud. Conservative pundit Dennis Prager is currently suing Google on similar grounds for its restrictions on his Prager University YouTube videos. Among the suit’s complaints is that YouTube’s restrictions under false pretenses constitute breach of contract.
“Most users of Facebook, Twitter, Google, when they use those services they don’t envision they’re participating in a biased fora,” he said. “They believe that when they speak they people that choose to follow them will hear what they say and there are distressing pieces of evidence that suggest that’s not the case.”
Considering Cruz is one of the members of Congress leading the charge against tech censorship, this paints Phillips as either stunningly uninformed, or as a hack who would rather virtue signal about conservative principles than examine whether there are actual violations of the law when it comes to the unending series of tech censorship examples.
On Thursday, Big League Politics reported that Facebook provided us with a statement outlining their plan to censor all Facebook users who link to Infowars content without explicitly condemning Alex Jones. This new plan reaches beyond merely banning an individual, extending the ban to anyone who has the audacity to think positively about Jones.
In an attempt to clarify its stance, Facebook told Big League Politics that the platform will let users make posts complimentary about Infowars or reflecting them in a positive nature, but will not allow users to post links to Infowars videos, unless they are doing so to condemn the content.
This would seem to mean that simply linking to the Infowars website is now prohibited, as virtually every article includes videos featuring Jones, and a live stream or replay of the most recent episode of “The Alex Jones Show” is featured on the sidebar of the Infowars website.
It appears Phillips is indeed uninformed, or willfully ignorant, of the current crisis.
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