A Ban on Ron Paul Supporters

A Ban on Ron Paul Supporters

By Kate Phillips

The right-leaning side of the blogosphere, and especially some of the leading Repub-blogs, have been ablaze over the decision by RedState.com to bar comments and diaries from those enthusiastically Web-savvy and driven backers of Representative Ron Paul.

To recap first of all, Leon Wolfe over at RedState, under a headline that included “Life Is Really Not Fair,” wrote on Monday:

Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul. Those with accounts more than six months old may proceed as normal.

Now, I could offer a long-winded explanation for *why* this new policy is being instituted, but I’m guessing that most of you can probably guess. Unless you lack the self-awareness to understand just how annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans can be. Which, judging by your comment history, you really don’t understand, so allow me to offer an alternate explanation: we are a bunch of fascists and we’re upset that you’ve discovered where we keep the black helicopters, so we’re silencing you in an attempt to keep you from warning the rest of your brethren so we can round you all up and send you to re-education camps all at once.

(Early this year, RedState, which features several bloggers, was bought by Eagle Publishing, a company that also owns Regnery Publishing and Human Events, among other ventures that cater to conservative Republicans.)

Now, avid Caucus readers know the Paulites are heavy-duty keyboarding fans of the Republican-libertarian candidate. They try to win every text-messaging contest out there. They complain on our site that Mr. Paul doesn’t get enough, er, the equivalent of ink on The Times’s Web site. We know many of them well.

They’re not prohibited from commenting here, unless they use abusive language or slurs, etc., that don’t meet our guidelines.

But this little dustup has spurred an interesting debate, one that takes place on the left and the right (and on all blogs) over cheerleading for various candidates (Go, Candidate Go!) when it does not further the discussion. More important, some would contend this ban rides up against the so-called democracy of the Internet.

Over at Captain’s Quarters, Ed Morrissey disagreed with RedState’s decision, saying it would more likely hurt the site than Mr. Paul and his supporters. Here’s part of what he had to say yesterday:

… I disagree with Leon’s assumption that these Paul supporters are all or mostly cryptoliberals. Plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans exist in the party, along with the former Buchananites and isolationists of the GOP. Instead of cutting these people off, it might be better for Redstate to keep engaging them. After all, Paul will not be in the race all that much longer, and we need those voters to stay in the GOP when Paul disappears. There are worse impulses than libertarianism.

Heck, I’d even interview Ron Paul, just to get a chance to challenge him (respectfully) on some of his positions and see how he responds. I put in a request yesterday to do just that, and if we can make it work, we’ll have Rep. Paul on the Heading Right Radio show, where listeners can ask their own questions and continue engaging the Paulites. Engagement can be understandably frustrating, but in the end, it forces us to sharpen our own arguments and challenge our own assumptions — and both are good processes.

For those who live and breathe in the world of the Internet, there’s another piece to this debate, provided today by David All, at TechRepublican.com. He agreed with Mr. Morrissey, adding that Republicans would need the Paul supporters to help defeat — in Mr. All’s choice of a candidate — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And, with more and more Republican sites sprouting up to try to match the left’s Internet strength in fund-raising and online voter engagement during this election cycle, the Paulites provide Mr. All with another point of entry in this debate:

Personally, I recognize that Paul’s support is very, very real, especially in the politics + tech sphere. He is the people-powered Howard Dean candidate of 2008 which I’ve been saying we need to “prove” the importance of an effective Internet strategy. He is that Revolution.

Of course, there was bound to be reaction among the Paulites. And not all of it printable here. At PeachPundit, there’s a sampling of the more offensive write-ins — we’d advise adult-only eyes take a gander to understand why some may be weary of being blasted.

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MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007


Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.

It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.

Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.



MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007


Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.

It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.

Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.

(Article continues below)

Try it for yourself, post a bulletin from your MySpace account with a link to Prison Planet contained in the text. Click here and copy the html code into the bulletin window and press send. Then go to "Show Bulletins I've Posted". You will notice that your link has been hijacked and now links to a URL that begins with http://www.msplinks.com - this is MySpace's filtering middleman that was launched earlier this year to supposedly combat spam assaults and phishing scams.

When the link is clicked, it doesn't go to the Prison Planet.com link you intended, but instead forwards to the MySpace home page.

"These links are legit and we are creating them," MySpace.com President Tom Anderson announced in April. "They are not viruses or whatever else your conspiracy theorist friends told you. They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!"

The problem with this statement is that Prison Planet.com is an alternative news website that has been featured and referenced in hundreds of mainstream publications and is also carried as a news source of Google News. Though our detractors are fond of arguing that we are "not a credible news source," the contention that we are either a spam, phishing or virus website is completely false.

MySpace should come clean and admit that it is now following an official policy of censorship based on political affiliation, and that its readers are not left free to make up their own minds on the credibility of any particular story, but are intentionally prevented from accessing certain websites that MySpace deems contrary to the political agenda of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Why is this important? Shouldn't MySpace have the right to block any website they wish? After all, it's their website, they decide the content.

Firstly, websites such as MySpace, Wikipedia and Digg pose as virtuous online information democracies yet are bossed by bias censors and patrolled by organized armies of trolls whose sole purpose is to discredit and delete controversial information by launching unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on the credibility of its source or its very right to be discussed (Wikipedia trolls deleted a list of Republican sex scandals, among a host of other manifestly provable controversies).

They are also wide open to abuse from nefarious government agencies and corporations seeking to "memory hole" sensitive information from the web, as was documented by the WikiScanner scandal. In this climate, a media watchdog like Prison Planet should be welcomed, not shunned, censored and blocked off by MySpace filtering software.

Secondly, this is the model for the imminent arrival of Internet 2, a government regulated and controlled cyberspace police state where bloggers require ID numbers and permission from the powers that be to simply express an opinion, and then that opinion is subsequently subject to censorship and deletion if it is counterproductive to the interests of the state.

Earlier this year, MySpace were caught red-handed when a moderator unwittingly admitted that Prison Planet.com was one of the alternative media websites that MySpace was blocking from its messageboards and bulletin posts.

In a discussion thread, a MySpace user complained that his Ron Paul post had been censored, to which a MySpace moderator responded, "Ron Paul wasn't being censored, it was the prisonplanet.com part of the message that was being filtered out."

The moderator later clarifies that it was beyond his control and that "prisonplanet.com" is on a list of URL's that are automatically blocked by MySpace's servers.

But Prison Planet isn't the only website to be targeted by Murdoch's censorship jackboots - in January 2006 MySpace enacted a policy to block all You Tube links, a move that resulted in a boycott of the social networking website after thousands complained before MySpace was forced to restore the links.

Please use this link to contact MySpace and let them know what you think about their decision to censor political websites that don't toe Murdoch's corporate agenda.