Caitlin
Johnstone publiceerde afgelopen zaterdag een artikel waarin ze verder
ingaat op de zuivering van het internet door Facebook en Twitter.
Waar aanvankelijk naar de inhoud van berichten werd gekeken zijn nu
de accounts van o.a. Anti-Media, WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) en
PoliceThePolice volledig verwijderd van deze 2 platforms……..

Ofwel
Facebook en Twitter fungeren als censuuragenten voor de
overheid…… Terecht stelt Johnstone dat de overheid in de VS (en
elders in het westen) nog maar weinig geloofwaardigheid over heeft, het is dan ook zaak dat organisaties als Facebook en Twitter de
functie van censuuragent op zich nemen, immers als de overheid dit
openlijk had gedaan, waren de rapen gaar geweest…….

Het
is echter vrijwel zeker dat de VS overheid platforms als Facebook en
Twitter aanstuurt wat betreft de keus voor te censureren accounts,
ook gezien een conferentie eerder dit jaar, waar WSWS over berichtte
op 5 oktober jl. Het gaat hier om een conferentie van de United
States Special Operations Command, een sectie van het ministerie van
‘Defensie’ (zou het ministerie van Oorlog genoemd moeten worden), die
supervisie heeft over de US Special Forces. De conferentie droeg de
naam ‘Sovereignty in the Information Age’ en ondanks de vage titel,
ging het er tijdens die conferentie over hoe alternatieve nieuws- en
opiniesites te censureren…… Mensen lees ook dat artikel en de
haren zullen je ten berge rijzen….*

Internet
Censorship Just Took An Unprecedented Leap Forward, And Hardly
Anyone Noticed

by Caitlin
Johnstone

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.”

Lee Camp [Redacted]

✔@LeeCamp

UPDATE on the massive Purge of 800 dissident voices happening in the U.S.

Banned from Facebook yesterday:

-Antimedia

-FreeThoughtProject

-PoliceThePolice

-Minds social media

Suspended from Twitter:

-Antimedia + editors

-FreeThoughtProject + editors

-PoliceThePolice + editors

12:58 AM – Oct 13, 2018

2,403

2,358 people are talking about this

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 uproaron
Twitter, and my account was quickly restored
with an apology.
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. People should be legitimately freaked out by this, because it
affects us all.

Daniel McAdams@DanielLMcAdams

· Oct 12, 2018

Replying to @caitoz @InmanAlex

The entity that is making censorship decisions for Facebook, as publicly announced, is the Atlantic Council, a partly US government-funded entity. At what point will the extremely tight ties between these companies and the US government end the “they are private” argument?

Daniel McAdams@DanielLMcAdams

Is this a private entity? pic.twitter.com/5oGABYjMqz

3:26 PM – Oct 12, 2018

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.”

#FreeAssange! (tweets by campaign)@JulianAssange

A securocrat’s vision for state censorship (as channeled through the Atlantic Council)https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/05/pers-o05.html …

8:45 AM – Oct 5, 2018

The US military’s vision for state censorship

The Atlantic Council, a key partner in social media companies’ drive to censor the internet, has published a summary of a US special forces conference outlining a plan for systematically gutting the…

wsws.org

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 Barbara 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.

Thanks
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