Thanks for engaging, HN isn't a great platform for this kind of dialogue but here goes:

1. Re: NBC conglomerate angle-

With respect, the "giant media monopoly" take is completely without merit. I don't work for NBC, I'm not presently working in media, I'm definitely not in the room, but the inference that there is executive level intervention on this sort of thing is, as physicists are known to say, "not even wrong."

NBC at the executive level cares about its own business, growing its audience, improving its technology, growing its partnerships, its own monetization. It supports the "right" of ZeroHedge / Federalist / Daily Caller / Breitbart / Washington Examiner to monetize because if it didn't it would be counter to its own self-interest, its own need to monetize for itself.

Beyond that...NBC very simply has zero leverage over the Google Ads business.

Beyond the absence of motive, and the absence of leverage, whatever the hypothesized causal mechanism for such a conversation and transaction...having engaged in executive conversations between media and advertising...I don't know what to tell you. The thought that anything like it happened is fantasy.

The conglomerate angle is wrong. The mental model that grants it credence is both wrong and useless, a waste of glucose. Forget it and move on.

2. Re: NBC reporter angle

There was no executive level engagement, but it is not only plausible but likely that individual reporters work with various organizations/non-profits that have a mission to demonetize and discredit the right wing ecosphere garbage and its publishers. That happens all the time.

There absolutely are individuals who care deeply about the peddling of that sort of bullshit and work like lawyers to find needle-in-haystack conditions under which a Terms of Service violation can be alleged. That's exactly what happened here.

Most of the time it fails, but on occasion when the political waves are tilting the boat slightly in one direction or another, that may be enough for it to succeed.

Doing that work is well within the bounds of a media business. Organized executive conspiracy? No, an activist individual. There are lots of them, they're called journalists. The shit that they care about is why they get into the poorly paid, thankless business of journalism.

3. "...starving out dissenting voices/don't fit establishment narrative"

There is simply no "starving out" of "dissenting voices". It is precisely the opposite. It has never been easier to monetize "dissenting" garbage, to automate the production of it, and there has never been more of it.

Not only from a business perspective, but politically, the Trump administration's series of attempts to use the machinery of the law to attack the business and boring process of fact finding, conventional reporting- its active measures to manufacture chaos- is exactly the opposite of a starving out.

4. "Siege mentality"

While there is no defensible argument that there is a "starving out" I completely agree with the presence of the "siege mentality" in the emotional dynamics of people who make "dissenting" arguments.

My own personal view is that this is just emotional immaturity. There is a science and a mechanism to human conversation, and a "dissenting" view by definition attacks that long established machinery, machinery that predates human society.

Lots of other creatures have "conversations." Just about every species has power dynamics. The "dissenting view" stuff lives in those playbooks and anyone who feels "besieged" kind of just needs to grow up, put on the big boy pants, recognize what they're doing isn't new, recognize what game they're playing, etc.

There is a long, long history of study of these dynamics. I go to things like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chomsky's Manufacture of Consent, and then newer work on argumentation- Lucy Suchman comes to mind. But there are a lot, lot, lot of lenses on this.

5. Plumbing of surveillance capitalism

Yeah, having worked in the space...I'm a lot less worried about this than I used to be, but it's a complex issue and too deep to go into here. From a publishing perspective, I do think the world would be better off for my definitions of "better off" if there were more subscriptions and less advertising, but everything has tradeoffs.

6. ZeroHedge itself

I personally don't have a problem with ZeroHedge, most of the bullshit they publish is transparently and easily dismissed bullshit. I do find the small irony that ZH is failing to monetize effectively to be amusing.

Federalist is much more skilled at pushing the antagonism button, and I think the people who work for it are engaging in systemic criminal incitement. But they are extremely skilled at staying within the ToS bounds.

7. Bigger picture

There is no bigger picture in this specific story. There is no harm to "free speech."

There is an ongoing battle around what constitutes "public" discourse, and it is only going to become more intense as we figure out more direct ways to pump stuff into people's brains (cf FB going big into VR and neuro). In the architecture of the western society we live in, most of the attacks on the components of informed free speech- things like facts, reality-based reports, even the recognition that there is an unforgiving reality that supercedes political BS- those attacks are (mostly) coming from the team that (mostly) claims to be suffering from them. But the loss of a sense of "objectivity" cuts multiple ways.

Again, not a great platform on which to have this conversation. Happy to take it elsewhere if helpful.

Cheers.