“Hulu’s censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country.”
While social media’s partisanship and Big Brotherish thought control have been on all our minds in recent years, the current Internet controversy has a slightly different slant:
- This time it is Democrats complaining. We’re used to having Republicans and other non-Democrats grumbling about having their accounts shadow-banned, frozen or closed, their posts taken down, and worse.
- This time it’s Hulu — a video entertainment streaming service, not a social media company or banking service — taking “the wrong side.”
- And now it’s not about the standards for regular services, but about accepting, or not, advertising.
“The Disney-backed streaming service Hulu is refusing to run political ads on central themes of Democratic midterm campaigns,” writes Michael Scherer for The Washington Post, “including abortion and guns, prompting fury from the party’s candidates and leaders.”
The ads are almost innocuous. Tame stuff. So what is Hulu up to?
Suraj Patel, a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York City, protested the service’s refusal to run his ads. Then, after some back-and-forth — and editing — his ad was allowed to run: he had to replace the “climate change” with “democracy” and, The Post relates, swap “the footage of violence at the U.S. Capitol with footage of former president Donald Trump.”
This is irksome. Hardly a matter of The Truth, as “three executive directors of Democratic committees” put it, quoted at top. It shows how normal business advertising (on an unregulated entertainment service, not a normal news network) is a tricky biz, considering the unwillingness of the programmers to tick off viewers, who probably turn to Hulu for a respite from politics.
Yet, it would be better if Hulu didn’t allow any political advertising rather than some … and then only after editing. Who do the folks at Hulu think they are? Twitter executives? Zuckerberg?
I wonder if my Democratic friends will remind me that Hulu is a private company that can do as it wishes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “Democrats Protest a “Dangerous Path””
When the only alternatives are silence, discernible hypocrisy of the ordinary sort, or meta-hypocrisy, expect people to engage in meta-hypocrisy. In this case, expect the left to mock the right ostensibly as hypocrites for failing to denounce Hulu (regardless of whether anyone on the right exhibits actual hypocrisy).
I wonder when the political left will just insist that “hypocrisy” has a definition different from that now in any dictionary, and after how many hours Merriam-Webster will begin supporting the new definition.