October 12, 2006

Columbia U/YouTube/MySpace/US Dept. of Interior: Left Tries to Crush Free Speech

Consider the following oddly similar current stories:

• YouTube blocks Conservative videos while leaving up pro-Al-Qaeda videos.
• The U.S. Dept of the Interior blocks Conservative bloggers (e.g. Captain's Quarters, Cox and Forkum, Michelle Malkin, LGF, etc.), but leaves up Liberal bloggers (e.g. DailyKos, Democrat Underground, etc.)
  
• MySpace blocks a pro-Israel page (Google cached copy is here) but leaves up various anti-Israel pages.
  
• and, students at Columbia University storm the stage to keep Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist from talking.
  

I just don't believe that YouTube, the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, or MySpace has an official policy biased against Conservatives.  So what's going on here? What's the explanation?

Let's start with YouTube. With 65,000 new videos uploaded daily, there's no way for YouTube to inspect each one and even consider censoring it. In fact, the company's official policy is for the site's community to be self-policing:

YouTube said it does not monitor the content of video submitted by users, though it prohibits videos that are violent. The site relies on users to alert the company to offensive videos, and YouTube reviews requests for removal.

So if Conservative videos are being blocked on YouTube, it means that users are emailing YouTube claiming that they find the videos to be offensive. The Libs have cleverly found that they can shut down YouTube distribution of videos that show a point of view they want to suppress. All they have to do is claim that the video is offensive.

Given that this is surely happening in the case of YouTube, it appears to be a likely explanation for the similar events at the U.S. Dept of the Interior, and at MySpace. Libs are emailing to say that sites they disagree with are offensive, leading the proprietors to shut down those sites.

And of course, at Columbia University, the students left no doubt at all that they want to prevent people they disagree with from speaking, even though the views being expressed by Gilchrist are shared by so many Americans, that Congress has recently voted to build a 700-mile fence on the border with Mexico.

So this is the latest tactic of the Left. While claiming to support free speech, in fact, they oppose it for those who disagree with them. Using this new tactic, they are seeking to keep people from hearing, views that they disagree with.