An Observation about the New LiveLeak upgrade and why this sounds like the work of triggered Liberals
By now, I've apparently upset some people here by my caustic rhetoric about the changes at LiveLeak. And some of the replies back to me have been justified. In the heat of the moment, a knee-jerk reaction is not totally unexpected. But after launching a fusillade of threads about the new upgrade, and yes, most of them have been directed at Hayden Hewitt, it seemed appropriate to step back and look at some of the changes from a disinterested perspective. And the one glaring change, notwithstanding the "glitches" in things like points, avatars and the like, is LiveLeak's new found moral compass.
The old LiveLeak's TOS states that they don't believe in censorship. Well, that's true up to a point. After Jihad John started going Benihana on some people, Hayden, along with the other founders of LiveLeak, decided to no longer give ISIS a platform from which to showcase their knife skills on innocent people who didn't buy into the bullshit of Islam being a religion of peace. But that is for another topic. So, their choice to selectively censor ISIS was actually a good thing. And yet now, with this new upgrade, LiveLeak is actually violating one of the fundamental tenants by selectively censoring uploads that they find offensive. Or maybe it's some of the new people here who see LiveLeak as a place of unfettered Free Speech and that is something they just won't tolerate. I think it's a little of both. Case in point: I upload a tongue in cheek jab at LiveLeak using the Budd Dwyer suicide to graphically drive home a point. The post got a lot of positive statements and lots of thumbs up. And then today, it's been deleted.
Someone commented that advertisers were none too happy about some of the content on this channel because it might reflect badly on them, the advertisers. My response is simple: Don't advertise here then. But that would pose a problem to the LiveLeak Administration. That fact is why I uploaded the Business 101 for Hayden Hewitt video. If you take on advertisers to help with cash flow, but yet want to stick to some principles of journalism, something is going to suffer. And what's suffering now is the integrity of LiveLeak.
People don't come to LiveLeak to be handcuffed to some moral code by the "already decided world view" crowd, i.e. Liberals. They come here for the free-for-all verbal give and take which, occasionally, can get a bit ugly. And in the interests of transparency, I have been one of those who is guilty of that behavior. But that still doesn't change the point. If anyone would bother to read LiveLeak's TOS of service, they would come to the realization that the current Website upgrade is at odds with the core values of why LiveLeak was stated in the first place. And given the news of how the media has started to clamp down more and more on free speech, you don't have to look any further than what's going on now with LiveLeak. Yes, LiveLeak is redefining the media, but not in a good way.