It has been reported that YouTube is also banning videos calling out their blatant acts of censorship.
As private companies, Facebook, Google and Apple aren't violating the First Amendment. But the question of if these companies are truly playing fair still remains. Concerns about free speech aside, the policies imposed by these companies on their users are exceedingly vague by design. Operating under a cloak of ambiguity gives tech giants the ability to do as they please, silencing whomever they wish, with a simple mantra: "They violated the guidelines."
But when no one knows what the guidelines are, including the companies pretending to enforce these inane policies, virtually anything can be a violation.
Censoring Alex Jones
On the banning of Alex Jones, Apple has said the company "does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users. Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions."
In a similar vein, YouTube reportedly commented that, "When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.”
What is hate speech?
Now that the term "fake news" has lost its sting, it seems the Left has decided "hate speech" will be their new phrase du jour. What constitutes hate speech is often elusive to the unoffended party, and what companies like Apple and Facebook view as "hateful" is even more hard to ascertain. Indeed, it would appear that offense need only be taken when it is useful to the Leftist paradigm.
Writing for the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro contends, "[T]he political Left has no clear standards. So, for example, social media companies like Twitter will 'accidentally' suspend Candace Owens, a black woman, for simply substituting the words 'blacks' and 'Jews' for 'whites' in Sarah Jeong tweets to demonstrate the double standard in the media; Jeong, however, retains her elevated position at The New York Times."
Shapiro is not the first to take notice of the Left's wishy-washy definitions, especially regarding hate speech. Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News and creator of Brighteon.com, has issued a statement on the censorship of Alex Jones. Adams contends that Apple, Facebook, Google and their ilk have been engaging in a coordinated racketeering effort to take out Jones and his network -- and that "hate speech" is really nothing more than a tool used by the Left to silence conservative views.
"It's clear that this censorship effort was a coordinated, criminal racketeering effort. Number one is that the Department of Justice should now arrest the CEOs of all of these companies: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, all those who censored InfoWars. They should be arrested right now and charged with RICO Act violations. They are running a criminal racket, an online racket with the purpose of silencing all voices with which they disagree," Adams states in the video. Watch below:
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