While
most indie media was focused on debating the way people talk about
Kanye West and the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an
unprecedented escalation in internet censorship took place which
threatens everything we all care about. It received frighteningly little
attention.
After a massive purge
of hundreds of politically oriented pages and personal accounts for
“inauthentic behavior”, Facebook rightly received a fair amount of
criticism for the nebulous and hotly disputed basis for that action.
What received relatively little attention was the far more ominous step
which was taken next: within hours of being purged from Facebook,
multiple anti-establishment alternative media sites had their accounts
completely removed from Twitter as well.
As of this writing I am aware of three large alternative media outlets which were expelled from both platforms
at almost the same time: Anti-Media, the Free Thought Project, and
Police the Police, all of whom had millions of followers on Facebook.
Both the Editor-in-Chief of Anti-Media and its Chief Creative Officer were also banned by Twitter, and are being kept from having any new accounts on that site as well.
“I
unfortunately always felt the day would come when alternative media
would be scrubbed from major social media sites,” Anti-Media’s Chief
Creative Officer S.M. Gibson said in a statement to me. “Because of that
I prepared by having backup accounts years ago. The fact that those
accounts, as well as 3 accounts from individuals associated with
Anti-Media were banned without warning and without any reason offered by
either platform makes me believe this purge was certainly orchestrated
by someone. Who that is I have no idea, but this attack on information
was much more concise and methodical in silencing truth than most
realize or is being reported.”
It
is now clear that there is either (A) some degree of
communication/coordination between Twitter and Facebook about their
respective censorship practices, or (B) information being given to both
Twitter and Facebook by another party regarding targets for censorship.
Either way, it means that there is now some some mechanism in place
linking the censorship of dissident voices across multiple platforms. We
are beginning to see smaller anti-establishment alternative media
outlets cut off from their audiences by the same sort of coordinated
cross-platform silencing we first witnessed with Alex Jones in August.
This
is about as acute a threat to our ability to network and share
information with each other as anything you could possibly imagine. If
new media outlets are beginning to silence dissident voices together in
unison, that means we can see entire alternative media outlets not just
partially silenced but thoroughly silenced, their ability to grow their
audiences and get information out to heavily populated parts of the
internet completely crippled.
This is huge, this is dangerous, and this is being under-reported. When I was removed from Twitter in August for “abusing” John McCain, there was a large and outraged uproar on Twitter, and my account was quickly restored with an apology.
And I’m really grateful for that, but the phenomenon of multiple
high-profile alternative media outlets suddenly being silenced in unison
by the two biggest social media platforms should be generating more
outrage than some ornery Australian blogger losing her Twitter account,
not less. This should be the top story in alternative media, because it
affects us all.
Any
time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our
ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you’ll always get
some guy in your face who’s read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows
everything, saying things like “Facebook is a private company! It can do
whatever it wants!” Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook
is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship
is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of
government.
Speaking of the Atlantic Council, it recently published a very interesting 21-page document
about a US military conference detailing, in present tense, how Silicon
Valley tech giants are being used to nullify the threat that the new
media landscape poses to the US power establishment.
Of this document, World Socialist Website writes the following:
Enter
the social media companies. The best mechanism for suppressing
oppositional viewpoints and promoting pro-government narratives is the
private sector, in particular “technology giants, including Facebook,
Google, YouTube, and Twitter,” which can “determine what people see and
do not see.”Watts adds, “Fortunately, shifts in the policies of social
media platforms such as Facebook have had significant impact on the type
and quality of the content that is broadcast.”The private sector,
therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government
propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. “Business and the
private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in
combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important…. In
the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the
general public’s increased trust in them as institutions.”
The
best way to deal with a manipulative sociopath is to point and make a
lot of noise every time they do something weird and creepy. The more you
let them abuse you in private, the more they can rope you in and get
you playing along with their sick agendas. If you notice them doing
something weird, the best way to nullify all the tools in their wicked
little toolbox is to point and yell “Hey! What are you doing?? Why are
you doing that? That’s weird!” Get people looking, because such beasts
can’t advance their manipulations with a lot of critical eyes on them.
Propaganda and censorship operates very much the same way. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of the Streisand effect,
I encourage you to begin to acquaint yourself with it. Named for an
incident in which Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress online
photographs of her Malibu residence and thereby inadvertently drew far
more attention to them, the Streisand effect describes the way attempts
to hide and censor information can be used to draw more attention to it
if the coverup attracts the interest of the public eye. Every censor
needs to prevent this from happening in order to do their job
effectively; if it looks like removing something from public view would
draw more attention to it, then they cannot practice censorship in that
case.
So let’s Streisand this thing up, hey? Let’s make a
big angry noise about this new cross-platform escalation in internet
censorship, and let’s make a big angry noise any time anyone makes a
move to silence dissident political speech in the new media environment.
Manipulators can only function in darkness, so let’s never give them
any. Anything they try, we need to make a ton of noise about it. That by
itself would be throwing an enormous stumbling block in their path
while we find new ways to clear a path for more and more networking and
information sharing. These bastards have controlled the narrative for
too long.