Big Tech melts down: Truck convoys, Joe Rogan are frying their circuits

February 7, 2022 in News by RBN Staff

 

 

Source: WorldTribune.com

Freedom Convoy in Ottawa

 

Can you be knocked senseless if you don’t have any sense to begin with?

After taking several severe blows from freedom fighters over the past few weeks, the Big Tech freedom suppressors have doubled down on censoring those who don’t adhere to their leftist narrative.

To recap:

• GoFundMe took down the fundraising effort for the Freedom Convoy in Canada.

• Facebook removed a group organizing a Freedom Convoy to Washington, D.C.

• Spotify removed dozens of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” amid calls from the Left, including the White House, to squelch the popular podcaster’s free speech rights.

In halting the campaign for the Freedom Convoy, which had raised over $10 million, GoFundMe claimed to “now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.”

In a statement Friday, the company said “Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.”

The Canadian Trucker Convoy has since restarted its fundraiser on the Christian crowdfunding alternative GiveSendGo, raising more than $1 million in less than a day.

The Ottawa Police Department tweeted out a statement that thanked GoFundMe for caving to the city’s demands to withhold funding from the convoy.

The OPD statement also called on other platforms to follow suit, while labeling the grassroots movement against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s authoritarianism an “unlawful demonstration.”

“We want to thank GoFundMe for listening to our concerns as a City and a police service. The decision to withhold funding for these unlawful demonstrations is an important step and we call on all crowdfunding sites to follow,” the department tweeted.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson also praised GoFundMe, tweeting: “I want to sincerely thank the team at GoFundMe for listening to the plea made by the City and the Ottawa Police to no longer provide funds to the convoy organizers. In light of the unlawful behavior that has transpired in the last few days, they have come to the right decision in support of our city and our residents.”

Watson added: “These protesters have been holding our city hostage for a week now, and I’m hopeful that limiting their access to funding and resources will restrict their ability to remain in Ottawa. I am imploring similar crowdfunding platforms to take the same position and not enable the group in it’s fundraising efforts, which would deal a blow to our efforts to put an end to this occupation.”

The Ottawa Police Services Board, in a Feb. 5 meeting on Zoom, concluded that they were helpless to stop the well-organized freedom fighters. Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly, meanwhile, boasted that he and other officials had stopped the GoFundMe for the Freedom Convoy.

Facebook on Tuesday removed “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” a group of more than 100,000 people who were organizing a trucker convoy to Washington, D.C. in protest of vaccine and mask mandates, J.P. Knowles reported for DFC Today.

Facebook shut down the personal accounts of some of the organizers as well, the report said.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the group violated its policies surrounding QAnon. Facebook does not allow the promotion of QAnon, which was labeled in 2020 as a “violence-inducing conspiracy network.”

Mike Landis, one of the group’s organizers, said that while some fringe posts could get by in a group so massive, none of the organizers were involved with QAnon so that should not have led to the closing of their personal accounts in addition to the group.

“None of us, on my personal page there’s nothing,” Landis said. “None of us had any of that stuff. That’s an outright lie … could there have been people that posted something from that in the group possibly? Yeah, because there are so many people posting stuff it was hard to keep up with. So I’m not gonna say that there wasn’t someone that wasn’t even a part of us but just someone that was on the page posted something, that’s possible,” he continued. “But I know as far as myself personally and the other guys, there was nothing.”

Meanwhile, thousands of Australians took to the streets of Canberra in support of the Freedom Convoy.

The Post Millennial noted that, during the violent rioting in the summer of 2020, GoFundMe financially supported and promoted the illegal “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle, even after several people were murdered in the zone.

“GoFundMe has supported violent, illegal movements such as CHAZ/CHOP but has cited ‘police reports of violence and other unlawful activity’ and its policies against ‘violence and harassment’ as its reason for seizing the Freedom Convoy’s crowdfund,” the Post Millennial noted.

Spotify appears to have removed approximately 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s “The Joe Rogan Experience” as the company faces continued pressure from the Left to boot Rogan, their top performer, from the platform.

“The apparent removal of the episodes, all of which were recorded years before the pandemic began, was spotted by JREMissing,” CNET reported. “The fan-made website uses Spotify’s API to compare available episodes to a database of all episodes recorded.”

Gizmodo reported that it “manually checked” JREMissing’s claim that the episodes had been removed and “confirmed the site’s assessment.”

Patrick Keeney wrote in a Feb. 4 op-ed for The Epoch Times: “This leads us to the controversy between Neil Young and Spotify, which hosts the podcaster, Joe Rogan. Young is unhappy with two guests Rogan has interviewed on his podcast, accusing Rogan of using his show to spread ‘dangerous misinformation’ about vaccines and the Covid virus. Young delivered an ultimatum to Spotify: ‘They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.’ Spotify went with Rogan.”

Young and other ancient rockers joined anti-free speech leftists in keeping up the pressure on Spotify, which appears to have caved.

” ‘Misinformation’ is a curiously wobbly concept,” Keeney wrote. “It appears that misinformation consists mainly of ideas that those in power find inconvenient or troublesome. For example, a few months ago, anyone who said that ‘cloth masks don’t work’ was accused of spreading misinformation. Today, we know that cloth masks are useless. A year ago, anyone who opined that Covid-19 likely originated from a lab-leak in China was swiftly condemned as Sinophobic conspiracy theorist trading in misinformation. Now, the preponderance of evidence points to Covid originating in a Wuhan lab.”

Keeney continued: “When politicians and their proxies in the media prattle on about misinformation, it’s a good rule of thumb to ask what they are trying to hide.

“The guests whom Young accuses of spreading dangerous misinformation are two well-credentialled and highly accomplished medical doctors. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist and the most published physician in his field. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the invention of mRNA technology. By any standard, these two doctors are experts.

“Both men have misgivings about the safety of the Covid vaccines.

“Joe Rogan doesn’t assert whether these two doctors are right or wrong. He claims no expertise. But nor can Neil Young. And, of course, having expertise is no guarantee of getting it right. As Steven Weinberg says, ‘An expert is someone who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.’

“Yet Young somehow believes it is incumbent on him to determine the information appropriate to a critical discussion concerning social well-being. He seems to think that Spotify should not host a show that debates the safety of vaccines and is doing his best to shut it down.”