One of the greatest living American visual artists and red-pilled, truth-tellers Danny Hellman’s main Twitter account has been suspended. Danny has a back-up account; @Danny_Hellman, but it has much less followers. Danny has not just lost followers and contacts, he’s also lost an archive of his opinions and digitized artwork and photos going back a long, long way.
I know the feeling. When my first YouTube account was suspended for copyright complaints, I felt like I was punched in the gut. I felt exactly the same way when Vimeo took down the 1st episode of UNJABBED. It sucks to have all that artwork you sweated over and spent hours creating only to have some nerdy jerk in Silicon Valley nuke it into oblivion with the minimal effort it takes to push a button.
Danny Hellman began his amazing illustration career before the turn of the 21st century, before the rise of the Internet. In those days, there was paid work in illustrating for publications. The early iterations of the big Internet platforms directed readers and viewers to "Legacy Media" websites. Years later, nearly all those print publications have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Instead of being paid to create artwork, artists now post their artwork and films on sites like Twitter and Facebook free of charge while these wealthy websites reap the advertising revenue that the unpaid “content providers” provide. Naturally, a publisher that uses unpaid work is going to have a big edge over publishers that pay its workers. Not surprisingly, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon have wiped out the competition and have become enormous monopolies. After the Internet giants dominated and crushed print publishing, they turned their greedy gaze to every nook and cranny of the real world to invade and conquer. The artists, writers and filmmakers who brought eyes to their sites were more a burden than an asset. So began the great purge of free-thinkers and the authoritarian censorship we see on the big Internet platforms now. As these platforms operate as vertically integrated publishing monopolies, there is no place to go where people can just happen on your artwork. You may live and work in Brooklyn, but if you get banned from the big social media platforms you could just as well live and work in a yurt in Mongolia.
Sadly, the traditional defenders of the First Amendment pretend nothing has changed. The American Civil Liberties Union declined to comment about what Vimeo did to UNJABBED, saying Vimeo was a private business. At best, their statement reveals clueless and antiquated thinking. What’s worse is the ACLU is ignoring the more sinister implications of big social media platforms’ new direction.
I asked Danny for a comment and he sent me this:
It feels to me like Twitter & other social media platforms are less about free speech, and more about narrative management...boosting pro-NatSec State accounts & squelching dissenting voices with their mysterious algorithms.
They sold digital media to us with the promise of "every man a publisher," but as we've seen the thing evolve over the last twenty years, a handful of social media companies have come to dominate the online space. We spend most of our time online on a handful of social media platforms, and the people who run those platforms clearly don't care about free speech, and instead are interested in pushing various agendas. Then you read pieces about how these companies are full of spooks and spook-adjacent folks, and it's hard not to come away thinking that this was all by design. Social media consolidated political speech, forced all the speech onto a handful of platforms, and now their primary mission seems to be the management of discourse, deciding what speech is allowable, and wha's verboten. It's censorship far beyond the scope of what the authors of the First Amendment could conceive. In an era when governments are ceding their power to global corporations, it seems to me our free speech protections are in need of an upgrade.
What do you think?
Thanks John!!!
Ken, thanks for letting us know about Danny Hellman. Danny H and Ken-- maybe try accounts on Twitter alternatives, such as gab and gettr. They're much less likely to censor. Appreciate you both.