A few days ago, I wrote an explainer about why PJ Media — and a whole lot of other websites — have paywalls of one sort or another. It comes down to this: websites cost money, and by far the most common and most effective ways to pay for them are through either advertising or subscriptions. We at PJ Media try to hold the line and only publish about one-quarter of our content behind the paywall, which, compared to sites like National Review Online is actually pretty — oh I hate to use this word — liberal.
But one of the reasons we have to have a VIP program at all has been that ad support for conservative sites has been chancy at best. We’ve managed to get by without too many articles demonetized, but it’s been a struggle and has affected a lot of our editorial policies in mostly minor ways, like all the d*mn *st*r*sks, but there are certain topics about which we’ve been shy.
As I explained, demonetization hits us where we live. Some topics we can only cover in VIP articles. And there are certain topics about which we have written that have been hidden and outright deleted by Facebook, notable among them Hunter Biden’s laptop and a lot of coverage of COVID.
The thing is, for all of this, Google is very good at brokering ads, good enough that it’s a hard business decision indeed to try and go another way.
It’s even worse on YouTube — which is of course owned by Google — where there are topics about which you can be suddenly and peremptorily demonetized or even have your YouTube channel removed completely, often for less-than-obvious reasons.
Well, okay, a lot of times they are obvious reasons, like channels that approve of guns, and guns are scary.
Things just might be changing. As we reported yesterday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced a pretty radical change in policies. They won’t be using “independent fact-checkers” like NewsGuard, Politico, Poynter, and Snopes to identify “misinformation.” Instead, they’re going to implement a system of Community Notes modeled on the system X has used for quite a while. Their reason will sound very familiar to anyone who has been reading conservative media — those “independent” fact-checkers have pretty consistently independently marched to the liberal drum major.
With Trump coming in, Zuckerberg says he sees an opportunity to go back to a more open free-speech model. Some people are very cynical about this, and they have reason to be; after all, Zuckerberg was preaching the free-speech sermon years ago, but Facebook didn’t seem to be reading from the hymn book. On the other hand, we now know from the Twitter files and elsewhere that the federal government was applying a pretty heavy “Nice business you’ve got here” hand to convince them. Maybe Zuckerberg didn’t like it but didn’t have the huevos that Elon Musk has.
You have to admit, whatever you make of his positions, it’s amazing Musk doesn’t walk bowlegged.
This puts Google/Alphabet in an uncomfortable position now. They could sort of ignore X alone and figure Musk couldn’t win. (Think of all the people who insisted that X-née-Twitter would fail and Musk would be out on his a**.)
But now? Facebook is still a big player; add in Instagram, and it’s even more so. And there have been promises that Rumble, which is really YouTube’s only major competitor, will now get equal treatment on Facebook.
My grandfather told me a story about when he was young and had a job as a mule skinner on road crews in Georgia, not that long after the Civil War. He said that he used to carry a length of two-by-four, and if a mule was not being cooperative, he would hit the mule right between the ears with the two-by-four, after which the mule would fall in line. He said the lesson was that mules had a reputation for being stubborn but that really you just had to get their attention.
It may be that with Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg falling in on the free-speech train, they will finally have Google’s attention.
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