Alternative Influence Network: The New Russia

In the past week Data & Society released a report on what they call the Alternative Influence Network. Basically a loose collection of YouTube vloggers nominally not of the left i.e. vloggers that call themselves moderate, classic liberal, or libertarian.

The report aims to attach these moderate vloggers to Racist Extremists through the process of degrees of separateion. For instance vloggers that have never espoused extreme right-wing views are being smeared because they chatted to someone who chatted to someone else who hosted a right-wing extremist to debunk their viewpoints. Talk about desperate!

This report has been timed quite critically, coming a week after vlogger Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad - he of the link over on the right  of my page) really got involved in polituics and went to Brussels on behalf of UKIP to highlight the new legislation going through the EU Parliament to stifle the internet.

So a week after he gets involved with an honest to goodness real life political party, all of a sudden a smear campaign is launched to discredit him and other non-leftist vloggers.

The report is worth a read, because of the degrees to which credibility is stretched to link these vloggers to white supremacists is well, incredible.

To say for instance that someone two or three links away from Sargon are tainted by white male supremacy (even the vloggers who are not white, nor male) is a pretty paranoid viepoint. Under normal circumstances it would be ignored and more than likely ridiculed. But because it esposes the leftist media viewpoint that someone has to be to blame for the loss of control of alternative media, leftist corporations will pick this report up, swallow it as gospel and use it to shadow-ban or completely ban these vloggers, even if they have not proffered a far-right viewpoint.

This is exactly the same leftist fear-mongering that started during Brexit and the Trump campaigs. In those instances Russia was to blame, for influencing the result of both votes. Note Russia doesn't seem to be to blame for Labour losing the general election. They were so shit even their Soviet sponsors couldn't influence that election even though the Tories were consistently crap throughout the campaign.

But it's the same old lefty whinging:  "it's not my fault people won't listen to me, someone must be to blame!" It can't be that your viewpoint is bollocks, that people just aren't convinced that your supposed utopia is achievable and that they definitely don't want to lose all their freedom to attain this socialist nirvana.

For many years, I've been here writing this blog and I must admit it does seem to be a bit echoey in here: there are no comments like there used to be, viewing stats are abysmal and I do often wonder if there is a bit of that creative filtering going on to stop my viewpoint being viewed widely. Way back in the early days of this blog I used to get regular comments and encouragement from some of the top bloggers of the day, such as Anna Raccoon (RIP).

These days, not a jot. Just maybe I was the Sargon of my Day. I don't know and have no way of proving any censorship. But if it has happened to me, then it can and probably will happen to those liberal blogs and vlogs out there just so the leftist media can continue to spout their BS unopposed.

The vloggers of YouTube have to be on guard and aware. The right also need to start looking at alternative content providers in order to keep the contrasting opinions out there.