I & I Editorial BoardConservatives have found a way to communicate that is free from Big Tech censors. But how long will it last?
Over the weekend, the liberal Brookings Institution released what it calls “a tool to monitor political broadcasts” on increasingly popular podcasts. Why? To combat “misinformation.”
Brookings treats the growth of podcasts the way Count Floyd would describe one of his movies on the classic Monster Chiller Horror Theater sketch on SCTV. “Ooh, that’s scary, kids, scary!”
Podcasts, it warns, “played a central role in disseminating election fraud narratives in the lead up to January 6.” Scary, kids!
Podcasts “also offered a prime avenue for the spread of pandemic-related misinformation.” Very scary, kids!
What’s really got the left scared is that nobody is controlling what gets said on podcasts. Valerie Wirtschafter at Brookings laments that “despite the real-world harms caused by this misinformation and the medium’s growing reach and influence,” podcasters “can say whatever you want.”
“The nature of the RSS feed, which is open-sourced and accessible by design, represents a significant hurdle for content moderation. Although Apple can remove the RSS feed from its platform, some smaller platforms allow any content on an RSS feed to be played through their services, making it easy for listeners to access a removed podcast elsewhere.”
The horror!
So, Brookings created the “Popular Political Podcast Dataset” to help out would-be censors.
Wirtschafter says that this database is just about “equipping researchers with tools to better understand and evaluate the ongoing conversations across the podcasting medium.”
And, to be sure, it is interesting to see what is on the minds of liberals and conservatives. Brookings used its tool to add up the most frequently uttered words on 79 popular political podcasts in the first week of September. It shows that liberals remain utterly fixated on Trump – almost all of the top 10 words on liberal podcasts involved Jan. 6, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. Conservatives, in contrast, were talking about things like the queen, 9/11, and Joe Biden.
But make no mistake, the only reason Brookings is raising this specter of unfettered “lawful but awful” dialogue is that conservatives currently dominate the podcasting world.
Brookings’ dataset shows not only the rapid rise in the number of podcast episodes, but the fact that the vast bulk of prominent political podcast series are conservative leaning. (The chart below was pulled from the Brookings website.)
What’s more, this effort is clearly more about controlling content than researching it. All the examples Wirtschafter provides of supposedly dangerous misinformation just happen to be positions held by conservatives. And elsewhere she writes that “Due to the way podcasts are distributed … addressing the problem will require a different approach than in other sectors of the tech industry, one that combines broad infrastructure changes and a fundamental rethinking of the role of the listener in content moderation.” (emphasis added)
Just who do you think would be in charge of imposing these “broad infrastructure changes”?
This new tool comes as evidence emerges that Big Tech has been working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration to stamp out content they don’t like.
As the Heritage Foundation’s Jake Denton notes, “the past few weeks of whistleblowers and court discovery have revealed evidence of the Biden administration’s deliberate weaponization of the power of Big Tech.”
Among the revelations:
- More than 45 Biden officials communicated with social media platforms about “misinformation.”
- Emails showing Facebook employees taking direct orders from government officials on which Facebook accounts to act against.
- Twitter suspended a New York Times reporter after White House officials explicitly requested his removal because his COVID tweets weren’t in keeping with official dogma. (Twitter later reinstated his tweeting privileges.)
So, don’t be at all surprised if you start to hear more calls to cancel conservative podcasts, or learn that Biden administration officials are “working with” tech firms to stop podcasters’ ability to spread “misinformation.”
What’s really very scary, kids, isn’t what podcasters are saying, it’s that so many on the increasingly fascistic left are now so eager to censor talk they don’t like.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Matt Taibbi
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
I guess when people have a choice of what to listen to, they prefer to listen to Conservative thoughts. Leftist ideas wither under competition.
Perhaps I should not be so surprised that “the liberal Brookings Institution” is part of the corrupt Marxist/Democrat Axis of Evil, but I am. On January 3, 2020 Donald Trump authorized 20,000 National Guard troops to be ready for the January 6 protest rally. But Pelosi/Capitol Police and DC Mayor Bowser refused to allow the National Guard into DC, despite multiple detailed warnings from the intelligence community. Yet the whole January 6 congressional hearings insurrection theory (or hoax) is about blaming Donald Trump for doing nothing while January 6 crowds had a wild 2-3 hours. An isolated incident hardly qualifies as an insurrection. Say what you want about Trump’s speech, but Trump authorized 20,000 National Guard troops to be ready January 6. And now we also have Capitol Police whistleblower evidence that Pelosi and the gang wanted the Capitol breach to happen and refused National Guard help. Perhaps Nasty Nancy wanted to create a “false flag” incident for political propaganda purposes? Same as she wanted the economy shutdown in summer 2020 to influence the election. Why is there no investigation of the wealthy Seattle anti-fa funders who paid for the fancy hotel rooms and buses delivering anti-fa fighters to the Capitol before the Trump rally protestors arrived. These anti-fa infiltrators flew the Confederate flags, smashed windows with crowbars, etc. These are the people that should be sitting in the DC gulag prison in solitary confinement for 2 years awaiting trial, not the trespassers.
If Uncle Sam attempts to start removing podcasts such as the #1 Bannon’s WarRoom, they will be stepping in the wrong bear trap. The American People in their Righteous Might will not stand for it. So Listen. Be Forewarned.
Don’t Tread On Me.
So… facism then. Got it.
The American people will do nothing to protect their free speech – they are pansies. The libtards will take over this area of freedom as well. It shows in the way people vote in elections, silly people wearing spit rags and getting death vaxes. American people are lazy and spoiled, they will do nothing to protect their freedom.
The FAILED Air America offered clues to the lack of listenable content on leftist podcasts. One can see why leftists hate right-leaning broadcasting of any kind.
https://www.brookings.edu/author/valerie-wirtschafter/
“Valerie Wirtschafter is a senior data analyst in the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Brookings Institution. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.”, in 2021. She is affiliated with the Democratic Party and is registered to vote in District Of Columbia.
Nothing says Marxist better than a freshly minted PhD in political science from UCLA, working for Brookings in DC.