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Saturday, 11 May 2019

‘Creepy tech oligarchs want to dictate your opinions’

spiked-online.com

Paul Joseph Watson on being banned from Facebook.

Paul Joseph Watson’s sardonic YouTube monologues against social-justice warriors, mass immigration and modern art have racked up millions of views and have even caught the attention of President Donald Trump. Last week, Facebook designated Watson a ‘dangerous individual’ and banned him permanently, alongside others on the right. spiked caught up with this ‘dangerous individual’ to find out more about social-media censorship. 

spiked: How did you find out you had been banned from Facebook?

Paul Joseph Watson: I received no notification whatsoever from Facebook. Facebook did not even send me a stock email to tell me my page had been deleted. I found out about it by media reports. I was on Twitter trawling through my feed. I saw CNN: ‘Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos have been banned.’ I thought, ‘Oh, really?’. I checked my Facebook and my Instagram and they were still up. They were still active for about half an hour after the first media reports came out. So immediately that tells you that they had given the story to the media, to get their justification out ahead of time, so that they could own the narrative.

They gave the story to the same media outlets like CNN, where their journalist Oliver Darcy has spent the past 18 months lobbying the social-media firms to ban CNN’s competition. People like Darcy have been abusing their platform and acting as activists rather than journalists, going to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and saying repeatedly, ‘Oh, doesn’t this post violate your policy? Doesn’t this violate your policy?’. 

It’s not just Darcy. There is also the likes of Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch and Will Sommers at the Daily Beast, who have been very successful in silencing a great percentage of the online people who were instrumental in getting Trump elected. This has never been about ‘bullying’, ‘harassment’ or ‘hate’, whatever those mean; it’s about them fomenting this political purge ahead of the 2020 elections. 

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