by Mark Steyn
The War on Free Speech
Over the last year or so, I've had a lot of emails and whatnot from people demanding to know why I'm not on Parler ...er, I mean Rumble. As it happens, I believe I am on Rumble, but right now I can't tell you for certain. Because, for various tedious medical reasons, I'm in France - and in France if I click on a Rumble link all I get is this:
NOTICE TO USERS IN FRANCE
Because of French government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in France. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.
That's "soon" in the Mann vs Steyn sense. It's been blocked now for almost a year. Headline from Le Monde, November 2nd 2022:
Rumble, une plate-forme de vidéos non modérée, est bloquée en France
« Refuge » de l'ultradroite, notamment américaine, la plate-forme héberge aussi des comptes de médias russes interdits en Europe, comme RT .
Which means:
Rumble, a platform of unmoderated videos, is blocked in France
'Refuge' of the ultra-right, especially American, the platform also hosts accounts of Russian media banned in Europe, such as RT.
RT is "Russia Today", which has been officially designated in the west as "state-controlled media". Which is to say the Russian state - and presumably they only let you hear what they want you to hear. And that's a bad thing. So in France they deal with the scourge of "state-controlled media" by having the French state shut down not only Russia Today, but also all the bazillions of "unmoderated videos" by the American "ultra-right" ...like, er, former Chair of the US House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes.
Gee, it's almost like in France all media are de facto "state-controlled". Remember the bad old days when the Soviets "jammed" the BBC and Radio Free Europe? Well, everything old is new again - except the jammers and jammees are now reversed.
Read the rest at the link 
|
