The Ontario Civil Liberties Association has received documentation from Ontario lawyer Aaron Rosenberg showing that Amazon interfered with and repeatedly deplatformed his client’s book.
The book is “China Virus: How Justin Trudeau’s Pro-Communist Ideology is Putting Canadians in danger”, by Ezra Levant of Rebel News.
Amazon is enabled by State corporate laws to in-effect operate as a book publishing monopoly.
Amazon benefits from corporate law by tax advantages and by shielding its executives and board members from personal liability.
Amazon occupies the internet, thus using internet facilities that have been largely created with public money. The internet is a publicly-funded shared resource, from landlines following rail and road networks, to university hubs, and so on. The very architecture of the internet is from publicly-funded intellectual efforts.
Corporations, such as Amazon, are free to be independent in their corporate strategy and functioning. However, non-specialized monopolistic online publishers and social media giants, because of their fundamental and government-enabled societal role in giving individuals a voice to participate in democracy and to express themselves freely, with equal access, should not violate the constitutional, Charter, democratic, political, and natural freedom-of-expression rights of authors and readers, arbitrarily or by contract.
Blocking YouTube channels and banning books on Amazon are akin to requiring government authorisation to operate a printing press or to buy a photocopier or pen and paper. Only the technology and the administrative covering structures have changed. Establishment censorship is establishment censorship.
Amazon is applying the correct principle of free expression in publishing the historically influential works of Mao, Hitler, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Errico Malatesta, Adam Smith, and many others, but it is applying outright censorship against current works that it deems threatens the dominant establishment projects of the moment.
OCLA has noticed an aggressive censorship of influential works that potentially threaten the current global state of medical totalitarianism. “Public health risk” is being wielded as a ready-made pretext for deplatforming and censorship. This is obscene. There must be free expression, whether establishment structures have declared a pandemic or not. There must especially be free expression when the government is enacting draconian measures, such as a global lockdown and forcing individuals to wear masks, no less. Everyone must have a voice. Everyone is impacted by unprecedented (we argue reckless[1]) government actions.
It appears that Ezra Levant’s book may have been captured by the medical totalitarian net. Whatever the actual reasons for Amazon’s egregious violation of Mr. Levant’s free expression, and of the rights of his readers, the actions of Amazon are wrong and harmful to society.
[1] OCLA Report 2020-1, “Criticism of Government Response to COVID-19 in Canada”, by Denis G. Rancourt: https://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/OCLA-Report-2020-1-Criticism-of-Government-Response-to-COVID19.pdf
