OPINION:
By now you’ve seen (or at least heard about) the video of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai donning a Santa suit, twiddling a figit spinner and wielding a lightsaber all in the name of tamping down lefty hysteria over the removal of 2-year-old Obama-era Internet regulations falsely described as “net neutrality.”
The video, produced by The Daily Caller, has already spawned an epic Twitter battle between Mark Hamill and Sen. Ted Cruz over whether the Empire or the Rebellion would have sided with Obama on this one… or something.
But, the reaction of Internet giant Google and their heavy-handed censorship of the video has gone mostly unnoticed and is much more disturbing.
According to Daily Caller co-founder and Publisher Neil Patel, Google removed the video from YouTube “based on a bogus claim from a politically motivated man” and it took over seven hours for the exercise in free, political speech to return to the public square.
The fig leaf of legitimacy Google used to rationalize the obvious censorship of political speech they disagree with is comical and terrifyingly transparent. They said they removed the video because of a copyright infringement over use of about 15 seconds of The Harlem Shake.
That’s right… The Harlem Shake. A song that is only actually known by anyone because it has been ripped and replayed on about a gagillion different YouTube videos over the past five years.
Patel: “The Harlem Shake” is an embarrassingly outdated internet trope that peaked in popularity approximately four years ago. Like much of the content in the video, it was there to make a point in a funny way. A simple search on Youtube shows over 7,000,000 videos using long segments of the song with billions upon billions of total views. Our video used only a few seconds of the song and was not monetized — we were not making profit from this silly rendition of the FCC chairman dancing to a few seconds of a song uploaded to the internet multi-millions of times.”
Of course, the rest of this story goes as one would expect. The writer responsible for creating the punchline of a song complained that their “art” was being used without their permission. The publisher complained to YouTube and their parent company, Google, immediately removed the video.
Let’s be clear: The song was used (15 seconds of it anyway) for the sole purpose of expressing and illustrating a political position. And without a pause, without a second thought, the message was no longer available for the public to see, because Google just decided to remove it.
The beauty of this move, of course, is the proponents of “Net Neutrality” (like Google, Hamill, the unknown writers of “The Shake” and most other plaid-wearing hipsters who sip lattes and endlessly click YouTube videos instead of finding gainful employment all claim that the Internet regulations that Pai and the FCC just removed were instituted to keep the Internet open and free of censorship at the hands of big corporations… you know, like Google.
In summary, Google supports “net neutrality” because they want the Internet to remain “free and open” so when a video opposed their position they removed it so no one else could see or hear that opposing viewpoint.
Meanwhile, how many years did it take them to take action against ISIS recruitment videos?
Please read our comment policy before commenting.