A couple months ago, I was working on a project at my job. The goal was to identify potential system problems and send a message when something hinky was detected. I decided that when an issue was detected, I’d send a message that began with the words “System Notification” followed by some information about the problem.
But it didn’t work.
It should have worked, but it didn’t. Hmm. Interesting. I copied code from other places that worked just fine. But no matter what I tried I could not get my message to go through. There was no error message, no log, and no other indication that it didn’t work. My message just disappeared.
I had other people check my work and they all agreed that they could see no reason why my messages were, apparently, being censored. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there was nothing filtering the messages I was sending. Any message should have gone through with no issue. But they weren’t.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to finally accidentally figure out what was going on. For some reason, which I never did understand, if a message contained the word “notification”, it would just silently disappear. So, I changed my message to read “System Alert” instead of “System Notification”, and everything worked just fine.
If you know anything about coding, you’ll understand why this doesn’t make any sense. The software shouldn’t have cared what message I was sending. But it did.
Sometimes weird shit happens.
The Gateway Pundit has been reporting this week that T-Mobile has been filtering, well, their words are “censoring”, links to The Gateway Pundit articles. They’ve shown a thread, supposedly with a T-Mobile customer support rep, and are trying to rile up people against T-Mobile and Big Tech censorship.
I wanted to include a link to the original article but it’s no longer working. It’s possible The Gateway Pundit figured out what I’m about to tell you because, like the message I mentioned above, the article has silently disappeared. If they did figure it out, then shame on them for not apologizing.
Allow me to summarize it for you.
A customer supposedly reached out to T-Mobile’s customer support to ask about why the Gateway Pundit links were disappearing. The support rep suggested they do some basic troubleshooting, which is how every customer support chat I’ve ever been on has started.
Then the “customer” went on a rant.
The conversation escalated remarkably quickly and within a few exchanges the support rep was giving a legal opinion about how wireless carriers operate in the United States.
I’m calling shenanigans on this. I believe The Gateway Pundit has been Jussied. I toyed with the idea of saying that they had been “Smolletted” but that doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way.
Big Media and the Left saw Jussie’s fake attack and immediately thought, “hate crime”. The Gateway Pundit and a whole lot of people on the Right see a missing link in a text and immediately think, “censorship”. In both cases, people saw what they wanted to see. And in both cases, those people are wrong.
Allow me to explain.
First of all, when was the last time you were connected with a support rep that actually spoke or wrote proper English? I guess it could happen, but in my experience, I usually end up talking with someone in India. So, the username “Skye G.” is probably just a pseudonym for Vikram from Hyderabad.
Like Joe Biden, Vikram has a hard time pulling together a single sentence in American English. So how in the world is he able to give a legal opinion on a statement made by the FCC Commissioner, who is, according to Vikram, “a Democrat”.
Just the fact that Vikram specifically pointed out that Jessica Rosenworcel is a Democrat is enough to convince me that this is fake.
Yes, I said “fake”. Just because some pictures were posted that appear to be showing a text conversation doesn’t mean that the conversation actually took place. I can Photoshop a fake conversation about anything in less than 20 minutes. Unless I can touch the phone that contains this actual text exchange, I’m going to say that it’s all made up.
But wait, there’s more.
A minimum-wage T-Mobile support rep, regardless of where they’re from, wouldn’t be discussing legal issues with a customer. I’m guessing that’s something the lawyers at T-Mobile frown upon.
If the fake customer had been more concerned about getting to the cause of the issue, and less concerned about proving how smart he is to Vikram of Hyderabad, he might have taken Vikram up on his offer to troubleshoot the problem.
Instead of some conspiracy by T-Mobile to silence The Gateway Pundit, how about if I offer a couple more likely scenarios:
Here’s one: A bunch of Liberals received links to articles on The Gateway Pundit from their Conservative friends. Instead of deleting the messages or, you know, having an actual conversation about the content, maybe they reported the links as spam.
I’m sure T-Mobile has some algorithm that says if they get more than a certain number of complaints about a link, it gets flagged as spam. If enough Liberals get offended by links they receive, they could trick T-Mobile’s algorithm into deleting those links.
Another possibility is that it was a tech glitch. Maybe T-Mobile’s spam filter is looking for the word “gateway”, or “thegate” or even “waypun”. If that’s the case, then The Gateway Pundit would be blocked. For no good reason other than someone simply made a mistake.
Here’s one more that just occurred to me. It’s possible that someone with a bug up their ass about The Gateway Pundit, and access to T-Mobile’s spam filter, just edited the list.
Yes, I believe that The Gateway Pundit was “Jussied”. Someone trying to make a point about Big Tech censorship either made the whole thing up or blew an innocent mistake entirely out of proportion.
Vikram wanted to run through some troubleshooting tests to see if they could determine what was going on. Then the customer decided to make the conversation about censorship. Had the fake customer taken just a little bit of time to try to fix the problem, instead of immediately bitching about it, the issue could have been quickly rectified.
According to the article, this sort of “censorship” has happened in the past. Customers had to contact T-Mobile to get The Gateway Pundit links unblocked. Let me tell you something, if you can call T-Mobile and they’ll unblock a link for you, that’s not censorship. That’s a mistake.
There’re enough real examples of Big Tech censorship that we shouldn’t have to go around making stuff up. If the fake customer truly does have a doctorate in law, then he/she should be smart enough to know that arguing with Vikram isn’t going to solve anything.
Come on Conservatives. We’re better than this. Americans are supposed to see problems and try to solve them, not intentionally try to make them worse.
If you only take one thing away from this, here’s what is should be: Things aren’t always due to some big Liberal conspiracy. Somethings weird shit happens.
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