Wednesday, February 28, 2018

YouTube Discards Bombard

The purge of conservative voices from the major social media platforms continues. It's not just extreme right wingers being banned. Recently people have been banned from YouTube for criticizing the Florida students making the rounds in the media to advocate for gun control, or even just for criticizing CNN's coverage of it. There is no safety in being merely moderate. Anyone who isn't a line-toeing lefty is liable to see their accounts suspended, demonetized, or banned. There have been many examples.

Recently YouTube decided to ban Bombard's Body Language, one of my favorite channels. It's funny because I didn't even know for a long time that she was conservative, as she critiques Republicans and Democrats alike. Ambiguous conservatism is no defense from the purges. YouTube issued her a "third strike" and permanently disabled her account. And by the sounds of it, much of her content was only saved on YouTube and thus has been lost to the world.

Her channel was excellent. She critiqued body language from publicly viewable videos. Often her observations are enlightening, in that they become very obvious once they are pointed out. Hopefully she able to retrieve her content. She has a Patreon account and is now releasing content from her Vimeo account, which has about 400 followers -- a dramatic shift from YouTube where she had over a quarter million. I would highly encourage anyone to sign up for Vimeo and follow her there, and the rest of the conservative diaspora.

While these purges are annoying, even infuriating, there is a silver lining: this is how the established social media platforms will destroy their own market dominance. These corporations live and die off growth. How can they be growing when large segments of their potential user base are being turned away? Twitter turned so many conservatives away that it allowed breathing room for Gab to arise. Facebook lost a million users last quarter. Now YouTube is forcing serious content creators over to a competitor. People like Bombard may be paying a heavy burden in all this, but they are also the ones who have the power to really destroy the social media monopolies. Please support them.

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