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The Internet is filled with stories about conservative web sites and media outlets getting their content banned on social media or YouTube!. But Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative lays out just how deep this blacklisting of conservative web sites goes. He writes:
Conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, and all other Enemies Of The People had better start planning now for what happens when they are denied their online and social media platforms. Frontier is not a big player, obviously, but this shows what can happen when technological gatekeepers pick and choose what you are allowed to see by labeling any content they don’t like as “violence,” “hate,” “adult,” or “disturbing.”
UPDATE: This from the reader who was blocked trying to access TAC:
I just spoke with FSecure for the 3rd time and was told that the blocks and labels come from the “blacklist” which is compiled by a group of many contractors who read through the flags made by internet users and decide what their status should be. FSecure would not tell me who the companies are that create the blacklist. “Good” websites are white listed.
UPDATE.2: That reader continues:
This warning was encountered after activating Frontier Secure’s parental controls in an attempt to make the browsing experience for my children less hazardous to their young psyches. Little did I know at that time that what would in-fact become blocked would be mostly the kinds of content we frequent as Christian homeschoolers in pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty. At first, the blocking did not reveal the reason and I thought that the websites were just not functioning correctly. Then I started using a different browser and it was then that I encountered the actual reasons for all of these websites being blocked. The American Conservative is simply one in a sea of many conservative sites that are being blocked by the parental controls of this security program. There are some liberal leftist sites (Daily Kos, National Abortion Federation, NARAL, NOW, and Advocate{dot}com, for example) that are blocked but not nearly as many as there are centrist conservative sites being blocked.
Read more here.
