Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos appeared on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot Ch. 125 this morning and discussed authoritarian action by progressives at social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.
“There’s something very serious going on when Facebook is teaming up with governments to enlarge the definition of hatespeech to include perfectly respectable concerns and normal opinions held by millions of people, rebranding that as some kind of abuse or harassment or hate speech… and then banning it from the Internet,” Yiannopoulos said. “These private companies teaming up with government to do this kind of stuff from underneath us, on platforms we all assume are free and open places where we can go and discuss whatever we want with our friends, this is of a kind of Orwellian nightmare.”
“This is a kind of genuine threat to the ability we have to communicate honestly and openly with the people that we love, people we know, people we don’t know, these platforms teaming up with leftwing governments to redefine words and to ban…” he continued.
“And not just ban now, to actually arrest, to actually have the police arrest a guy,” Breitbart News Executive Chariman and Breitbart News Daily host Stephen K. Bannon interjected, referring to the arrest of a man in Scotland over allegedly “offensive” Facebook posts about Europe’s migrant crisis.
Bannon pivoted to the recent news of Twitter shadowbanning conservative and libertarian users: “Your drill down on Twitter has got the Twitter corporate hierarchy in complete panic mode, does it not, sir?”
“Quite right, too, because I’m telling people about Twitter what Twitter doesn’t really want people to know,” Yiannopoulos responded. “It is using a variety of sneaky, slimy tactics to reduce the exposure of its users to conservative points of view, to delegitimize, to ridicule, and to disempower conservative voices.”
Shadowbanning, he explained, results in tweets from targeted individuals being blocked from appearing in followers’ timelines. “Twitter started doing that to me and to a lot of other conservative voices, a lot of people involved in the online digital culture wars,” Yiannopoulos stated.
“Twitter likes to speak of itself in terms of being a public utility, being the free speech wing of the free speech party; that’s a lie,” he continued. “They’re only a free speech party if you’re a progressive. You can say whatever you want if you have the right social justice opinions; you can swear, you can threaten people, you can do whatever you want provided you have the right politics. But the minute you step out of line as a conservative, they come down on you like a ton of bricks.”
Noah Dulis is the Deputy Managing Editor of Breitbart News and co-editor of Breitbart Tech. Follow him on Twitter @Marshal_Dov.
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