Meet the Censored: Matt Orfalea

Again, the question revolved around a pair of videos from CNN and NBC that YouTube had not removed elsewhere on its website, yet in the context of the lesser-known Morrow’s livestream, the same clips of Holt and Gupta talking were now punishable as medical misinformation. The double-standard was undisguised. Under some public pressure, YouTube reversed its decision on Morrow, only to turn around and delete Orfalea’s own video on the same subject.

Orfalea is no stranger to issues with YouTube. Five years ago, PBS selectively edited an interview Judy Woodruff conducted with Green Party candidate Jill Stein before it uploaded what viewers thought was the “full” version to YouTube. In fact, the PBS/YouTube upload had edited out a long section of a Stein answer railing against Hillary Clinton’s advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Orfalea made a video comparing the two versions that you can see here.

More recently, he made the video seen at the top of this page, noting that Facebook suppressed the hashtag #Revolution at the same time Mark Zuckerberg was releasing his famed cornball video of himself riding an electric hydrofoil surfboard on the Fourth of July, to the dulcet tunes of John Denver.

Orfalea has a sense of humor, and tries to create content with a light tone, but there’s a serious angle to all of these episodes. This is especially true in light of the Biden administration’s moves this week, which show an increasing determination to have Internet platforms crack down on speech even between individuals — even pre-publication material. I asked him to elaborate:

Matt Taibbi: How did you violate the “violent criminal organizations” rule?

Orfalea: It’s crazy. It’s just a 13-second video, a clip of Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter. I saw a clip of him bragging about his Starbucks, drinking a latte in a car. And I just thought that was darkly hilarious that you have this terrible person and he’s promoting Starbucks. And of course, it’s the last person anybody would ever want in a commercial for their product.

They’re saying it’s associated or involved with violent criminals in some way. Violent criminal organizations — which is weird because the only organization in that video is Starbucks.

Do you make your living on YouTube? Does this affect your ability to support yourself?

Orfalea: On so many levels. Not 100% of my income is from YouTube — some comes from Patreon, some comes from freelance work I get as a result of YouTube. But if I can’t upload any of my livestream videos, I’m screwed.

Taibbi: What went through your mind when you saw the White House announcement about working with Facebook?

Orfalea: You have all these people who’ve been complaining about fascism since Trump, and then this is actual, by-definition, fascism. According to the classic definition, it includes the merging of corporate and state power.

Look, I’ve done a lot of videos that are very critical of Biden. So the thought does go through my head, “Is this why my channel was targeted?” Now that Jen Psaki admitted that the government does have this direct relationship with the social media companies, picking targets, telling them who needs to be [flagged], it’s hard not to think about it.

Taibbi: Why should anyone care if a hashtag is suppressed on Facebook?

Orfalea: It’s funny. I’d just been looking into how China censors their internet when that #revolution censorship on Facebook happened. And there are just so many similarities. There’s Harvard research from 2013 that says about China: they actually let a lot of criticism of the government go through. That’s not their main concern.

Their main concern is to stop anything that will lead to “collective expression.” And that’s what hashtags are. They’re a collective expression. And they lead to real-world collective action. It just seems like we’re really mimicking Chinese censorship to a “T” now.

Taibbi: The “American Political Science Review” article you refer to says, “Some of the most highly censored events are not criticisms or even discussions of national policies, but rather highly localized collective expressions that represent or threaten group formation.” So their idea is that the Chinese are trying to prevent “group formation.” Isn’t that a fanciful read of the situation, to compare it to us? We’re not China.

Orfalea: People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.

Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”

The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship.

 

Taibbi

Matthew C. Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on Substack.