Have you wondered why we sometimes put asterisks in the words in our headlines?
Like this:
And this:
Why are we doing that?
Is it because we’ve gone WOKE?
Gone soft?
Are we embracing the censorship regime?
That’s what some of you have told me in (quite frankly very irrational and angry) emails you’ve sent me!
Like this one from William (last name and email redacted for privacy purposes):
William is BIG MAD at me for using asterisks!
William is a “big boy” and he doesn’t need my censorship! And he’s unsubscribing from my “pannsie” site!
I think it’s “pansy” by the way William, but whatever.
So….is that what we’re doing?
Did we cave to the woke mob and are we trying to censor the news from people like William who are big boys and can handle reading the full uncensored headline?
Well, if you believe that then you haven’t been around here very long or you don’t know anything about my history here or my character.
That’s not what we do.
That’s not who we are.
So….back to the main question: Why are we doing this?
Its probably for a strategic reason, wouldn’t you assume?
And to be fair, I’m sure most of you do assume that because for every one “William” who sends me a childish and immature email like this, there are probably one million of you who get it. So perhaps I’m preaching to the choir.
But I wanted to actually address it and give you the answer for why we do this.
And the answer is simple….because there IS a censorship brigade out there, but it’s not me censoring things from you. It’s Big Tech censoring ME from ever reaching you!
You see, once we publish and article, it goes a million different places.
It gets shared all over social media — Facebook, X, Telegram, TruthSocial.
It also gets blasted out to our email Newsletter which so many of you subscribe to (JOIN HERE FOR FREE).
And what happens in all of that is places like Facebook and the email companies have HUGE censorship technology that constantly scans for certain words and then deletes you if you use them.
The list is long, but words like killing or assassination or bombing or knife or gun or hundreds of other words can INSTANTLY get you banned.
All of a sudden, Mark Zuckerberg decides he knows what you should be allowed to see better than you do, so if the headline of our article includes a banned word and you try to post it on Facebook the post could be shadowbanned, or deleted or sometimes even the person trying to share it will get sent to Facebook Jail.
Same for email…if an article has a banned word in the headline and we include it in our email Newsletter, companies like Gmail and YahooMail and AOL and all the way down the line will determine that they know better than you what you should be reading and they’ll send that email into your Spam folder, or they’ll just outright delete it and never allow it to come into your Inbox.
That’s all very real.
And it’s getting worse.
So I have a choice, and it’s kind of like the choice Thomas Massie has in Congress…
I can choose to be ULTRA PRINCIPLED and use the banned words in my headlines with no edits and I’ll be SO PRINCIPLED and I’ll have taken a stand and people like “big boy” William will be so happy! Because we didn’t cave to the woke mob! That’s the Massie approach. Principled and you win the battle but lose the war.
Or…I can take the Trumpian approach which is to play their game with their rules and beat them at their own game, so that maybe I lose the war and I get an angry email from “big boy” William, but at the end of the day my email Newsletter makes it into your email Inbox and you get to read all the news from that day.
Which one of those two scenarios has the most winning?
I think you know where I stand.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
-Noah
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.