In his piece entitled “Was Social Media A Mistake? Here’s An experiment To Find Out,” Robert Tracinski argues that social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, killed the blogs. He points out that one of the really good things about the blogs was that they offered a decentralized media. But people moved away from blogging when social media caught on. According to Tracinski, the result has been “shadowbanning, arbitrary Twitter suspensions, and Twitter throttling the traffic of people they don’t like and controlling what articles you can tweet links to.” So, have we traded the old mainstream media gatekeepers for “new, worse, less publicly accountable gatekeepers in Silicon Valley,” as he suggests?
In his post over at The Federalist, Tracinski offers several reasons he believes that we’re being controlled by “a new breed of pinch-nosed Puritans with pink hair, piercings, and tattoos, who will shut us down if we don’t use the right pronouns.” He writes:
Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.
Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.
But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.