William Jacobson, founder of the conservative blog Legal Insurrection, writes that Amazon has terminated his website’s “Amazon Associates” account, which the site used to earn revenue via affiliate links.
Jacobson says that the company cites a TOS violation that Legal Insurrection had “remedied” in January — which Amazon acknowledged at the time and expressed thanks.
From Legal Insurrection:
For as long as I can remember, Legal Insurrection has participated in Amazon Associates, a way for websites to earn fees when readers shop at Amazon.com via links from our website.
It was an important source of revenue to us, and paid for some of the operating expenses readers never see.
On Saturday morning, April 28, 2018, I woke up to an email in my inbox from Amazon Associates telling me our participation in the program was terminated, our account closed, that the decision was final and there was no appeal. On top of that, Amazon was holding back any accumulated money it owed us.
There was no prior indication of a problem, or chance to cure. It’s always been out [sic] intent to comply with the program requirements. I detail what happened, including all the email communications, below.
In isolation, it’s just a website cut off from a source of revenue by an internet behemoth because the internet behemoth could. But if there was an anti-conservative ideological angle to it, either at inception or during the review process, it would be consistent with what is happening at high tech companies more generally. The problems Prager U and others have had with video restrictions and demonitization at YouTube, the exposure of Twitter shadow-banning, and the intolerance revealed at Google are just a few of the examples of an anti-conservative bias among internet giants.
Read the rest of the story here.
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