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Banning TAC Because Of ‘Hate’ & ‘Violence’

Conservatives: What are we going to do when they take away our online and social media platforms?

Here, from its website, is what Frontier blocks for its customers:

Who makes the decision that TAC’s website is “unsafe” because it advocates “hate” and “violence”?

A friend of mine who is a mainstream Christian writer and speaker reports that Frontier is blocking her personal website because it is “adult” and “disturbing”.

The Orthodox Christian writer and artist Jonathan Pageau, who has done some video presentations with Jordan B. Peterson (Pageau’s YouTube channel is great!) sees the handwriting on the wall:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is not blocked but the Family Research Council is blocked and labeled as hate and violence. Planned Parenthood and Teen Vogue are not banned at all but virtually every Pro-Life (All of the Big ones and most state levels) and Pregnancy Care group are blocked and labeled as some combination of adult content, disturbing, and violence or all three. Additionally, First Things is blocked and labeled as hate as is PJ Media, Front Page Magazine, Red State, The Weekly Standard, Christian Headlines, and many more. Conversely besides Daily Kos most liberal news outlets are fine including Mother Jones, HuffPost, Washington Post, The Nation, Salon, etc.

As Rod showed in the update, Frontier is claiming that they are simply applying the blocks according to some general blacklist available to all web/tech companies that is compiled by a group of organizations that are considered trustworthy but I was unable to get them to tell me who these companies are or what the name of this blacklist is. I was told that Frontier doesn’t come up with the labels but that they are from the blacklist. I asked them to remove the blocks for 3 separate websites and they said they would look into it and get back to me after their lab analyzes the sites.

It would be good to find out who compiles this blacklist and I suspect that some of the companies are activists just like Google is using. It isn’t acceptable for these groups to take it upon themselves to assign such libelous and defaming labels on these websites without some sort of notification process and transparency. Violence and Hate are really loaded terms and shouldn’t be showing up unless the site is a recognized hate group or terrorist organization.

Apparently I am the first person to make such a complaint to Frontier Secure and I find that hard to believe but I also haven’t seen any one else discussing it online. I do not plan to continue using the parental control feature offered by Frontier Secure but I am not sure how long it will be before the ISPs start blocking sites on the blacklist even without the internet security features activated. I pray that will never be the case, but from what I am seeing in the news regarding tech giants locking people out of their accounts, demonetizing videos, and shadow banning conservatives on social media etc., there is little to hang any hope on.

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