The Purging of Paul Joseph Watson

It may make me even more of a heartless, callous, mean-spirited right-wing bastard, but... it's hard for me to feel too sorry for Paul Joseph Watson. At the end of the day, unlike however many other hundreds of thousands of YouTubers, he's one of the ones who's landed on his feet and (apparently, according to that recent, slightly blubby documentary) he lives off the proceeds of his wordsmithying in quite a nice flat in South London. (Would that we could all make the Internet work for us like that!)

Having said that though, there are three points very much to be said in his favour:

1. He is very, very good at what does. (I'd rather listen to his angry ranty [Sheffield-born] Battersea-boi screeds than watch most other things on YouTube, let alone television.)
2. He does happen to be right about most things. (OK, I haven't listened to all his stuff. For all I know, he may once have touched some political live wire to do with US government pedo pizza parlours or whatever. And no, I'm not a free speech, gay rights and Paki-bashing libertarian-type either. But to most extents and purposes he's impressively perceptive. By the standards of the modern British right, he's surprisingly "sound".)
3. And yes, the most important thing he's right about is the matter of whether or not modern social media platform providers have the right and/or responsibility to censor what we say (and think) via their services. (Apparently it's all to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which some Republicans are supposed to be trying to reform. Or something.)

Because yes, that last one is a genuine effing problem. If President Trump doesn't have the right to block lippy followers on Twitter, why should Twitter have the right to ban users just because they don't like the cut of their jib - provided, that is to say, what they're being banned for isn't actually criminal. And then again, on the subject of criminality, how can Google claim they're just providing a service (essentially no different from the US Postal Service) that just happens to be abused by criminals from time to time (for example when nonces are sharing kiddie-porn) and yet reserve the right to censor YouTube (for example... if they don't like the cut of your jib).

And that of course brings us to PJW's recent problems with the Magic Face-Book. Watson has written up his own account of being banned by Facebook on Human Events and given a reasonably intelligent interview about it to sp!ked. And James Delingpole has come out swinging for the lad at Breitbart (in the wake, it has to be said, of The Donald himself on Twitter), declaring with characteristic British understatement that 'Silicon Valley censorship poses one of the biggest threats to Western Civilisation in the world today'. (It's up there with 'fundamentalist Islam, China, eco-fascism, neo-Marxism, and so on', apparently.*)

As it happens, I think PJW is right.

This is nothing less than election meddling. Everyone Facebook has banned was instrumental in getting Trump elected. This is punishment. This is a political purge. This has nothing to do with ‘hate’ or ‘violating terms of service.’

Well quite!

It just remains to be seen (a) whether or not it will work and (b) whether the likes of Donald Trump and his "conservative" allies will do anything about it.

*Demographic obliteration doesn't quite make the grade for Dellers's threat matrix, presumably. (Not to the same extent as the world 'badly needs' conservative jokes and memes, at any rate!)