Wait, you're both wrong!
Supporters of Barack Obama seriously need to stop abusing Web 2.0 community-policing tools to censor opposing political views. It's unbecoming, it's un-American, and it's deeply unhelpful to their candidate's cause. If they truly believe Obama is the best candidate for president -- if they truly believe in the "movement" he represents -- then they should welcome, rather than seeking to squelch, a free and open exchange of ideas that will presumably, if they're right, lead other voters to freely and openly reach the same conclusion. (And if they truly prefer silencing the opposition instead of battling them head-on in the marketplace of ideas, maybe they really should do what liberals keep threatening to do after losing elections: move to Canada.)
On the other hand, conservatives need to stop blaming these occurrences, which are caused by individual users abusing politically neutral technologies, on Google and other such institutions that set up the systems which are subsequently abused. See, e.g., the headline on the above-linked piece -- parroted by InstaPundit -- declaring, misleadingly, that "Google has officially censored my Barack Obama video." In saying such things, the anti-Obama crowd displays either an ignorance of the way this Web 2.0-style technology works (something John McCain would surely sympathize with) or a willingness to blatantly distort the truth in order to advance their pet theory of ingrained pro-Obama bias all along the MSM-Hollywood-Google axis. Blaming "Google" for the reprehensible actions of individual Google/YouTube users is so misleading as to be basically a lie -- and, as such, it is (again) deeply unhelpful to the cause, in this case the cause of raising awareness of the alleged pro-Obama bias. Blaming something on institutional bias when that is manifestly not the issue degrades the accuser's credibility, thus making it harder to get people's attention in other cases when institutional bias really is the issue.
Also: conservatives need to recognize that it takes only a small army of committed idiots on the Obama side to make this sort of thing happen. It doesn't require a grand-scale consipracy, and thus these occurrences do not imply that most "Obamabots" are in favor of squelching opposing views. That said: responsible Obama supporters who believe in the free exchange of ideas ought to vigorously denounce this sort of thing, and make clear that it has no place in the "movement."
On the other hand, conservatives need to stop blaming these occurrences, which are caused by individual users abusing politically neutral technologies, on Google and other such institutions that set up the systems which are subsequently abused. See, e.g., the headline on the above-linked piece -- parroted by InstaPundit -- declaring, misleadingly, that "Google has officially censored my Barack Obama video." In saying such things, the anti-Obama crowd displays either an ignorance of the way this Web 2.0-style technology works (something John McCain would surely sympathize with) or a willingness to blatantly distort the truth in order to advance their pet theory of ingrained pro-Obama bias all along the MSM-Hollywood-Google axis. Blaming "Google" for the reprehensible actions of individual Google/YouTube users is so misleading as to be basically a lie -- and, as such, it is (again) deeply unhelpful to the cause, in this case the cause of raising awareness of the alleged pro-Obama bias. Blaming something on institutional bias when that is manifestly not the issue degrades the accuser's credibility, thus making it harder to get people's attention in other cases when institutional bias really is the issue.
Also: conservatives need to recognize that it takes only a small army of committed idiots on the Obama side to make this sort of thing happen. It doesn't require a grand-scale consipracy, and thus these occurrences do not imply that most "Obamabots" are in favor of squelching opposing views. That said: responsible Obama supporters who believe in the free exchange of ideas ought to vigorously denounce this sort of thing, and make clear that it has no place in the "movement."
posted by Brendan Loy at
7/24/2008 08:24:00 AM
