Rancid.
Nasty.
Abhorrent.
The conservative community I grew up with found GoDaddy’s routine advertisements to be flagrantly obscene. Mothers and pastors sought to get churchgoing family members and congregants to boycott all business with GoDaddy, for the same reasons they sought to boycott Carl’s Jr. Or at least that’s what one would think was surely happening when reading conservative headlines. The ads were simply too suggestive, or too obtuse. Those were simple days. I miss those days.
These days, the tables have turned. The “anything goes” liberals have turned against the conservatives. Those who would speak against the dangers of alternative lifestyles or of demonstrably violent worldviews (i.e. Islam) are accused of engaging in supposed “hate speech”. Now anyone who leans to the right must be censored. Even innocent observers who appreciate diversity but spell out physical traits in Facebook comments end up getting their Facebook accounts blocked. Ironically, those who speak against white people, trashing whites, particularly white men, get no censorship treatment from Twitter, even while Twitter bans accounts for posts of so much lesser offense.
This has brought about a surprisingly minuscule “surge” of sorts of the uptake of re-embracing and re-idealizing the truly open Internet. Thus come along the upstarts like Minds and Gab. These are social networks that embrace diversity of thought, the original vision of the Internet, where everyone can share their minds and everyone has a chance to better the ideas and ideologies of everyone else by considering all perspectives.
Sadly, where there is true freedom there are always the occasional idiots and demented sociopaths who would seek to ruin things for everyone. And, of course, this happened, once again. Some crazy wackjob posted on Gab his intent to murder innocent civilians, and then he went and did it.
The good part about that story is that he forewarned the world that he intended to do it, giving the public both a chance to intervene as well as a path to discovering the psyche and background of the individual who would do it. Gab’s founder was immediately contacted by the proper authorities to provide information about the perpetrator’s posts and identity. Open Internet wins.
But the bad part about that story is that it became an excuse by leftist liberals to “block the intolerant” — a disturbing act of hypocrisy to say the least. It was PayPal, and it was GoDaddy, that decided that Gab must find new financial transaction and Internet services as a result of the mass shooter publishing his intentions. And, being a customer of both, I am fuming.
I have tens of domains registered with GoDaddy. They’ve been taking a lot of money from me every year. But to see them intervene in such a blatant act of disrespect towards an open and free Internet and against diversity of thought made me realize that we are taking our first steps towards the end of a free society.
Not only is it the responsibility of platforms to retain, indeed fight for, diversity of thought through supporting dependent platforms that facilitate collaboration of thinkers across the global space of netizenry, in this case it is a critical component of public safety. When demented individuals are willing to utilize an open web to communicate their intentions, there is a path to accountability. When those open platforms are expunged, the sociopaths will still act, they will simply do it in secret. Blocking platforms from existing so that sociopaths cannot make their intentions public benefits no one but the preservation of the sociopath. It protects the sociopath from his own accounting. And that is downright stupid.
My domain transfers away from GoDaddy are processing as I write this. My financial dependency upon PayPal is still pending. I have a PayPal Credit account which I will need to pay off. I have a Business Debit card which I need to cut. (That should be easy, I might do that here shortly.) I have used PayPal to receive funds from software sales; never again. PayPal has offices near where I live (in Phoenix/Scottsdale), for that matter so does GoDaddy. In fact, I used to work at GoDaddy. The thought has occurred to me to take a few hours to picket at both offices.
I’d love to hold up a sign that reads, “GoDaddy hates free speech,” and “PayPal is an enabler of violent oppression.” When and if anyone comes out to ask questions, I’d love to explain.
