Tag Archives: censorship

Russiagate Might Be Dead, but Big Tech Censorship Is Here to Stay, by Michael Krieger

The fake news about Russian collusion was that there was Russian collusion with th. In response to a nonexistent threat from Russia, big tech implemented various forms of censorship. Now that the fake news has been exposed for what it is, don’t expect the censorship to be lifted. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing. Zero.

– George Carlin

Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community and they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

– Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a 2017 interview on MSNBC

As someone whose website was slandered by the earliest manifestations of the hysterical Russiagate mob, I could go on and on now that’s the whole spectacle’s been disproven, but I’m not going to do that. Rather, I want to highlight how despite the whole thing blowing up, we’ll be living with severe direct consequences for years to come.

First, it’s important to point out that none of Russiagate’s most irresponsible grifters will face any serious repercussions for wasting the country’s time, money and energy on a fake story for the past two years. Russiagate was as much a business model as it was a conspiracy theory, and some of it’s most shameless peddlers made out like bandits over the past couple of years.

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Goodbye to the Internet: Interference by Governments Is Already Here, by Philip Giraldi

It’s only a matter of time before governments fully tame and domesticate the internet. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.

Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.

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Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control, by Tom Luongo

The harder government squeezes, the more that slips through its grasp. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no apparent reason.

The latest outrage is Twitter banning the account of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange’s mother, Christine.

Australian and New Zealand ISPs have gone bonkers IP blocking sites in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Sites like Zerohedge have been targeted in the past two weeks for publishing narratives orthogonal to what the governments in the West are comfortable with people consuming.

First it was Facebook, blocking and then unblocking Zerohedge with no apparent reasoning behind it. Now its ISP’s over-reacting to an emotional event ensuring that a good crisis never goes to waste.

And these ISPs are going much farther than just avoiding any potential legal liabilities. They are now openly calling for the platforms themselves — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — be regulated by governments to stop ‘dangerous information’ from reaching the eyeballs of consumers.

And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians underneath.

It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free. These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.

So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a large swath of people.

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Censorship vs. Suppression, by Eric Peters

Whether you categorize speech suppression by ostensibly private entities as censorship or not, it’s clear that between government and the private entities that control the internet, the ability to speak out is being steadily constricted. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:

Libertarians – me included – have wrestled long and hard with this one: Is it censorship when private entities do it?

No – not in a legal sense. Because these private entities do not have the power to forbid publication, per se.

But they do have the power to suppress (and even to punish) publication when the entities at issue effectively control the means of publication – and so it amounts to the same thing as censorship.

It may even be worse, since one can always get around governmentcensorship (see, for example, the underground Samizdat press in Tsarist Russia or, later, the anti-communist press in East Germany and Poland).

But how does one “get around” private control of the all-encompassing Internet and related “social media platforms”?

There is no alternative Internet – nor is one (given present technology/infrastructure) even conceivable, regardless of one’s financial ability.

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Truth Is What We Hide, Self-Serving Cover Stories Are What We Sell, by Charles Hugh Smith

Most sentient people expect to be lied to, repeatedly, during the course of a single day, and they are seldom disappointed. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion.

We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.Jean-Claude Juncker’s famous quote captures the essence of the era: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public. Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers, it’s basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is:truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.

The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR: we in the Federal Reserve saved civilization by saving the Too Big To Fail Banks (barf); we in the corporate media do investigative reporting without bias (barf); we in central government only lie to protect you from unpleasant realities–it’s for your own good (barf); we in the NSA, CIA and FBI only lie because it’s our job to lie, and so on.

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Avoid the Slippery Slope, by Robert Gore

Everything government touches turns to crap.
Ringo Starr

Social media companies, search engines, and payments platforms are excising conservative, libertarian, and assorted anti-government voices. SLL argued in “The Friendly Faces of Fascism” that the largest and best known of these companies were essentially arms of the government. They are mechanisms for conveying information, opinions, and commerce between billions of people. Given their reach, importance, and ties to the government, should these ostensibly private companies be subject to the First Amendment’s prohibition of government restriction of free speech and the free press?

The First Amendment states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. By its terms, the amendment applies to one institution, Congress. By necessary implication, freedom of speech and the press must also be the freedom to choose what not to speak or publish.

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The US military’s vision for state censorship, by Andre Damon

Ever more brazen, the Deep State has laid out its next steps towards total censorship and its publicly available. From Andre Damon at wsws.org:

In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.

This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

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The Freedom to Destroy You, by Porter

Where current trends will take what’s left of our civil liberties—we won’t have any. From Porter at kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com:

I hope you won’t think me anything less than a grinning optimist if I were to opine that the path from corporate censorship to corporate oppression is practically frictionless. Social media, Internet infrastructure, and now even payment processors have raised their red flags in a coordinated assault. It’s been quite a demonstration of malice. And I suspect it’s one that’s barely even begun.

That’s because the corporate-left’s attacks have all been ad-hoc to this point. Think of it as artisanal totalitarianism. All communist heroes and no five-year plans. The entire process relies too much on individual bolshevik valor. Normally it requires a twitter bugler to scream anathema, which may or may not generate the necessary prog frenzy, which then induces the relatively slow corporate gears to grind the offender into unpersonhood. It’s effective, but inefficient. And inefficiency is something corporations can efficiently resolve. But they formal need policy and procedure. Continue reading →

Americans Need Social Media Guided by the Rights Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, by Michael Krieger

Michael Krieger diagnosis of social media censorship is spot on, but his cure, for the social media companies to be driven by “principle, not profit,” is worse than the disease. If the social media companies are going to pick and choose which views they’re going to allow and ban, don’t exempt them from defamation and other laws that regular media platforms are subject to (that solution comes from Justin Raimondo). From Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

– Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

This past Friday, Alex Jones was de-platformed from the last couple of third party tools he had been using to publicly communicate his message after Twitter and Apple permanently banned him and his website Infowars. This means an American citizen with a very large audience who played a meaningful role in the 2016 election, has been banned from all of the most widely used products of communication of our age: Twitter, Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Apple’s iTunes.

You can point out he still has his radio show and website, and this is unquestionably true, but when it comes to the everyday tools most people interact with to receive information and communicate in 2018, Alex Jones has been thrown down the memory hole. Not because he was convicted of a crime or broke any laws, but because corporate executives decided he crossed an arbitrary line of their own creation. Continue reading →

US Senator Chris Murphy Says That “The Survival of Our Democracy” Depends on MORE Censorship, by Daisy Luther

Only someone in the government or one of its kept companies would think that the US suffers from a censorship deficit. From Daisy Luther at theorganicprepper.com:

Welcome to the United States of Censorship.

Your tour guide today is Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, tweeted some pro-censorship nonsense the other day. In doing so, Murphy proved that (a) he doesn’t understand the First Amendment, (b) he wants the internet to be an echo chamber, and (c) he must have slept through high school civics class.

Murphy tweeted that “the survival of our democracy” was dependent upon even MORE censorship.

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