Gateway Pundit: Oleg Atbashian Exposes Far Left...

Oleg's prepared remarks at the Social Media Neutrality Panel in DC, 2/6/2018

A reader who is a U.S. Army officer, has sent me a screenshot showing that my People's Cube was blocked on the Department of Defense computers because of "hate and racism." I'd have no problem if the category was "goofy-and-silly" because the Pentagon employees surely have more important things to do with their time. But "hate-and-racism"? That is so false, I won't even waste your time explaining why. But I was able to beat this block, more on that later.

When I lived in the Soviet Union, my speech was expected to be blocked. I did not believe in socialism and collectivism. I was politically unreliable. There was nothing I could do about it then. But I had assumed that if I were to move to the US, I'd be free to speak without censorship.

Imagine my surprise when I found out how many in this country, including in the government, love the same collectivist, socialist ideas I had escaped from. So I began to satirize the Left again, this time in English, and launched the People's Cube. That was in 2005.

Already in 2006 my content was blocked by Google. Since then my site has been blacklisted, shadow-banned, suspended, down-ranked, and otherwise hindered. We've been purged from Wikipedia; the fight was long and ugly. All three biggest online stores - Zazzle, SpreadShirt, and CafePress repeatedly removed my T-shirt designs. We've been slandered by Snopes. PolitiFact put us on their list of fake news sites. Facebook is limiting our shares and blocks them as "spam." We've been denied ad revenue due to organized complaints to ad providers. And, finally, my wife's contributions to the People's Cube have led to a forced resignation from her job.

Of course this affected our livelihood and caused loss of income.

Yes, these are private companies and they have the right to make their own rules. The conventional wisdom states that the REAL censorship only comes from the government. Now, the Department of Defense is government. We have arrived, my comrades.

I started digging. It turned out the DoD was using a private contractor, who used the database of another private company who - as we're told - can censor all they want. This is where the difference between private and government censorship gets really blurry.

To show how absurd this is, there was also a Holocaust website dedicated to the victims of Auschwitz, which the DoD also blocked as "hate and racism." My research took me to a company named BrightCloud that maintains a database where websites are pigeonholed into categories. Luckily, it had an open search functionality where all of you can find your own sites. I highly recommend it.

I submitted an online form, received a response, and was reclassified, along with the Holocaust site. A day later, the DoD also stopped blocking the both sites.

I was told it was the fault of a machine learning system based on some common patterns. That's so cool - I was misclassified by artificial intelligence! I have seen the future - and it looked like a dystopian sci-fi movie. At least the Pentagon didn't target me with a drone, so I should feel grateful, I guess.

Expect more "mistakes" like these when social media companies start partnering with the government to fight "hate speech." If you oppose us taking action against the tech giants now, remember this story when your own site disappears from the web.

But before we even do that, we must go after the "hate speech" classification. The best way not to fall into a trap is to remove the trap. What exactly is "hate speech"?

Hateful rhetoric coming from the Left never gets to be branded "hate speech," nor is it ever blocked on social media. This alone makes the "hate speech" label meaningless and exposes the one-sided agenda behind it. It is nothing but a slur used by the chauvinist left to silence dissent. No logical argument will persuade the leftist "hate speech police" to voluntarily give up this weapon. Instead, it must be outlawed legislatively as unconstitutional and an impediment to free exchange of information.

Just last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. This effectively renders unconstitutional any restriction of speech based on the so-called "hate speech" allegations. Justice Anthony Kennedy explains:

A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government's benevolence.

So the Supreme Court agrees - the "hate speech" label is unconstitutional and a deceptive gimmick. And yet, it is used to suppress conservative and libertarian speech by social media moderators and by algorithms in Facebook-Google-Twitter code. The same gimmick is also used by speech police in many organizations, schools, and government agencies, in violation of the Constitution.

The tech giants may be private companies, but if their main product is information, if they trade and make money off information, and if that information is of an existential value to our society, they can no more hide behind their private status than the landlords or healthcare providers can.

That means that tech giants can be forced by law to discard their "hate speech" and other ideological filters and to allow a free flow of information lest they be sued by the Bureau of Consumer Protection for violating consumer rights.

Food companies are required to label their products with precise quantities and daily values of ingredients.

But the product called "information" is regulated in the exactly opposite fashion. It is being filtered, altered, rejected, or exaggerated, creating a distorted and fraudulent picture of reality. If a food manufacturer tried to label his products the same way, he would be sued out of existence. Imagine buying fruit juice labeled with 0% sugar instead of the actual 100% and 100% of vitamin C instead of the actual 0%.

This clearly falls into the jurisdiction of the newly reformed Bureau of Consumer Protection, whose stated goal is to stop unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices.

As conservatives we reject government control over businesses. We repealed Net Neutrality because we don't want the FCC to treat the web like a public utility, subject to government rationing of free speech.

But I'm not talking about the government forcing companies to do things they don't want to do. I'm talking about forcing them NOT to do things like censorship. It's similar to the concept of "negative rights" in the Constitution. And it will also save them money and effort.

Unlike the FCC, the Bureau of Consumer Protection would treat the Internet as a marketplace for commercial products, one of which is information. Instead of suppressing speech, it would protect consumers against fraud - and the online censorship under the guise of battling "hate speech" is exactly that - " unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices."

If we outlaw the corrupt "hate speech" policing, it will free up the Internet and the rest of the media, it will pull the rug from under various demagogues who profit from the harassment of conservative, it will clear many honest people of libelous allegations, it will demolish the sordid cottage industry of "hate speech watchers," like the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose fundraising is directly proportional to how many honorable people they can defame as "haters."

Of course, social media should continue to block real spam and clickbait sites. The phonies won't be filing complaints and seek protection. But legitimate content providers who are being suppressed can and should request an investigation with the Consumer Protection Bureau.

Before conservatives are erased from the Internet, legal minds in the conservative movement had better select an appropriate case of content suppression and stage an exemplary class action lawsuit that would create a seminal precedent for all future cases. If no legal ground for such a lawsuit exists, we must work with our legislators to create it.

I couldn't address all the angles of these proposals in a short speech, so if you're interested, I recently wrote an article where I explain it in detail. It's called Why and how we must fight to subdue FacebookGoogleTwitter and you can find it in FrontPage Mag or on The People's Cube.