RevolverGuy friends Bryan Eastridge and Darryl Bolke recently launched the American Fighting Revolver P@tre#n page, which they poured a lot of energy into.
Unfortunately, the page was “deplatformed” yesterday, and is no longer available.
Former patrons of the site, and new readers, can still find the guys at their new American Fighting Revolver website. The previous history of P@tre#n entries will have to be reconstructed on the website, so for now, you may not be able to find some of the older material, but they’ll be working to fix that.
Some of the American Fighting Revolver material will be hidden behind a paywall, as it was on the former page. You can sign up on the website to get full access, as before, or just enjoy the publicly available content.
Please stop by the site and check it out. We’re all brothers and sisters in this effort to record the history of the revolver, discuss its current use, and promote its future. They could use your support right now.
7 FEB 24 UPDATE: See the new video from the AFR team, with updates on the deplatforming, and their plans for the new website. Watch it here on Rumble
This is troubling, but does anyone know why American Fighting Revolver was deplatformed and who did it?
They report they were one of many (last report: 5) firearms-related pages that were deplatformed following SHOT Show. Apparently, it wasn’t just them.
In the past few years, there’s been a few people who did this kind of work for various social media companies who turned “whistleblower” and explained how it all works. The companies that run these businesses issue relatively vague and broad policies that allow low-level employees a lot of discretion on who to shut down. There’s often no internal oversight or review of these actions–the employees are empowered to make these decisions on their own, and “deplatform” users without coordination or formal justification.
Typically, there is little opportunity for a targeted customer to appeal the decision. To begin with, it’s difficult to actually find someone at the social media company you can talk to, to plead your case (ever try to find a phone number for some of these online businesses? Good luck). Additionally, there’s often no defined process for handling an appeal, once it’s been filed. It’s a very ad hoc process, and that’s probably by design.
In some cases, the corporations that run these platforms issue specific instructions about the kinds of content they want to see eliminated or throttled, but in other cases they’re more discreet, and issue “off the record” instructions on who/what to target, so there’s no discoverable paper trail.
One of the important things to understand is that the employees who are given these jobs are often selected based on their known political affiliations, leanings and ideologies. As a result, they really don’t need a lot of specific direction on who to target, because their personal prejudices are naturally going to guide them towards the “right” people. This is a win-win for the bosses, because the desired results are achieved without their personal involvement.
I’m sorry to see this happened to AFR, but it’s not uncommon these days, particularly on social media platforms. It’s why we don’t play in that space at RevolverGuy.
GAB dot com allows free thinking
Thanks for this update, Mike. I’ve been an AFR member since their first post on Patreon, and wondered what happened when I tried to go to their page yesterday.
Remember when Patreon was where content creators migrated to, in order to avoid being deplatformed? I guess those days are over.