Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to "quell information rebellions" and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to "prevent the fomenting of discord.”
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words," the representatives were told. "America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America."
Today Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has suspended Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the Scott Horton Show, and completely removed the account of prominent Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren.
I'm about to talk about the censorship of Alex Jones and Infowars now, so let me get the "blah blah I don't like Alex Jones" thing out of the way so that my social media notifications aren't inundated with people saying "Caitlin didn't say the 'blah blah I don't like Alex Jones' thing!" I shouldn't have to, because this isn't actually about Alex Jones, but here it is:
I don't like Alex Jones. He's made millions saying the things disgruntled right-wingers want to hear instead of telling the truth; he throws in disinfo with his info, which is the same as lying all the time. He's made countless false predictions and his sudden sycophantic support for a US president has helped lull the populist right into complacency when they should be holding Trump to his non-interventionist campaign pledges, making him even more worthless than he was prior to 2016.
But this isn't about defending Alex Jones. He just happens to be the thinnest edge of the wedge.
As of this writing, Infowars has been censored from Facebook, Youtube (which is part of Google), Apple, Spotify, and now even Pinterest, all within hours of each other. This happens to have occurred at the same time Infowars was circulating a petition with tens of thousands of signatures calling on President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, who poses a much greater threat to establishment narratives than Alex Jones ever has. Assange's mother also reports that this mass removal of Infowars' audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do an interview by an Infowars producer.
In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government's policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.
This is especially true of the vast megacorporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive ties to US intelligence agencies are well-documented. Once you're assisting with the construction of the US military's drone program, receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site's content regulated by NATO's propaganda arm, you don't get to pretend you're a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they'll work with your competitors instead of you.
And yet every time I point to the dangers of a few Silicon Valley plutocrats controlling all new media political discourse with an iron fist, Democratic Party loyalists all turn into a bunch of hardline free market Ayn Rands. "It's not censorship!" they exclaim. "It's a private company and can do whatever it wants with its property!"
They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly "centrist" views will never be censored. Everyone else is on the chopping block, however. Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google's algorithms, and it won't be long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the establishment Syria and Russia narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same exact pretext as Infowars.
This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look like what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting media bit by bit.
Don't believe that's the plan? Let's ask sitting US Senator Chris Murphy:
"Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart," Murphy tweeted in response to the news. "These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it."
That sure sounds an awful lot like the warnings issued to the Silicon Valley representatives on the Senate floor at the beginning of this article, no? This is headed somewhere dark.
We're going to have to find a way to keep the oligarchs from having their cake and eating it too. Either (A) corporations are indeed private organizations separate from the government, in which case the people need to get money out of politics and government agencies out of Silicon Valley so they can start acting like it, and insist that their owners can't be dragged out on to the Senate floor and instructed on what they can and can't do with their business, or (B) these new media platforms get treated like the government agencies they function as, and the people get all the First Amendment protection that comes with it. Right now the social engineers are double-dipping in a way that will eventually give the alliance of corporate plutocrats and secretive government agencies the ability to fully control the public's access to ideas and information.
If they accomplish that, it's game over for humanity. Any hope of the public empowering itself over the will of a few sociopathic, ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchs will have been successfully quashed. We are playing for all the chips right now. We have to fight this. We have no choice.
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A great article about a concerning topic. As I was reading it I was thinking is this where platforms like steemit can deliver value to humanity and then my mind wandered into whether the witnesses start to get visits from “men in suits” if the audience started to grow to the size of Facebook and Twitter!
Hopefully people begging to exit the club. This is actually a good thing. They show their true colors... eventually everyone will be kicked out.
Why are these tech conglomerates receiving so much tax money? Just boycott Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Google, without our participation in their digital space they will become irrelevant. Then maybe can we put an end to government causing all these problems? Great work Caitlin.
Good reporting on this... I have been noticing smaller accounts and people being disappeared and vanished for a couple of months. I was banned from Twitter for dubious reasons 18 months ago. I was wondering why the crackdown was happening, and it seems like it's about a Global crackdown on dissent.
First, these deplatformings are going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The only people who will be willing to continue to post on those platforms are going to be coprophagic sycophants that I, and reasonable people, have no interest in hearing from anyway.
Folks that are presently on these platforms should, IMHO, coordinate a mass boycott of them. I started some years ago, and use none of them. Let's all join the real journalists and honest folks that tell the truth where they are, and quit using the 'services' that are serving US up on a silver platter to be cannon fodder, or no more than chattel.
Second, the way this was done is revelatory of the scope and power of the perps. From the fascist brownshirts in Congress that called for it, to the cryptically government funded platforms shutting it down en masse, the true colors and abilities of the fascists has been revealed.
Lastly, there is a way those that have been disenfranchised can fight back. It is fairly trivial to open accounts on these platforms, and making accounts that mimic unhinged leftists isn't hard either.
Why does this help free information? Because it skews their demographics, for one, and it also enables folks to use those pseudoleftist accounts to influence the dialogue, just like professional shills do, except to push for freedom instead of quash it.
Steem is uniquely positioned to benefit from this rolling purge of dissidents, and Stinc should be reaching out to the victims of the censors right now and guiding them to the various platforms like Steemit, Busy, Dlive, Dtube, etc...
I hope they are, because nothing will drive adoption and growth in both Steem and freedom than this purge, if it's used as an opportunity to recruit dissidents - that I believe are the majority, if diverse in their reasons and views for dissent.
Thanks!
What almost everyone - including Caitlin (sorry girl you are missing the whole point too, dear) - is forgetting and nobody is addressing though is the ROOT CAUSE of the problem.
I've just made a post explaining what it is and what we can do about it:
Mass Censorship: The Real Root of the Problem...(and what to do about it)
Good article in its intent but we need to go a lot further and outright ban the collection of user data in most cases to prevent the manipulation of common people by nefarious actors like the Koch's, Google, the CIA, the New York Times, etc, etc... They are all the same threat. The the real solution is to make data mining and ML algorithms illegal in any area that involves politics or is even tangentially related to it. FUCKING LIE TO THE MACHINES IN THE MEAN TIME
By the way alot, not most, internet services run on ram only, so a "forgetfull" tech is technologically easy right now. It is just your creation of ad dollars to induce you do buy Smart Water the next time you visit 7-11, all of which was tracked years ago, stand in the way.
I have never listened to Alex Jones. I would like to know for clarity, what are the things disgruntled "right-wingers" like to hear?
Hi Caitlin, thanks for the post. It is very informative and important as all your posts always are. I'm not a fan of Alex Jones but I believe in the right to free speech and am thoroughly against censorship. Upvoting and Resteeming.
I'm not sure if you saw this when it occurred back in February at the Oscars but it is worth bringing back into the publics attention, considering all that is going on now. Hollywood's Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences put the 8 year old daughter of a terrorist from Syria in the center of their #MeToo related main Oscars performance. The video is definitely worth a watch as it ties in with all that is going on now, including US and UK support for murderous terrorists in Syria, the White Helmets ruse and Hollywood/elitists child exploitation. It is quite important that the public be woken up to the provable very dark nature of all of this in my opinion. Hopefully you can share it with your discerning audience. Best regards.
#Oscars2018 Real verifiable child exploitation conducted by Hollywood- Story of Bana Alabed - Hollywood Caught Exploiting Eight Year Old Daughter of Terrorist in Syria For Women's Empowerment Movement at Oscars 2018 Ceremony
https://steemit.com/news/@clarityofsignal/now-playing-on-dtube-hollywood-caught-exploiting-eight-year-old-daughter-of-terrorist-in-syria-for-women-s-empowerment-movement
I also want to inform your readers that I am admin for WhiteHelmetsExposed on Twitter where I post up all the latest information on the devastating war on Syria and support for terrorists by western, Gulf State and Israeli countries.
Best regards and big thanks for doing what you do.
However much you foam, this is NOT censorship. That concept ONLY applies when it's done by government.
However corporatist they are, tech giant and social media are private. Yes, that "censorship" will likely happen to me because of my opinions; but alternative sources (gab.ai) exist now
Did you even read the article? Because it really doesn't look like it. You might wanna read more than just the title of an article because they usually have a lot more words and go into a lot more detail.
pgveer: "However much you foam, this is NOT censorship. That concept ONLY applies when it's done by government."
Caitlin: "And yet every time I point to the dangers of a few Silicon Valley plutocrats controlling all new media political discourse with an iron fist, Democratic Party loyalists all turn into a bunch of hardline free market Ayn Rands. "It's not censorship!" they exclaim. "It's a private company and can do whatever it wants with its property!""
pgveer: "However corporatist they are, tech giant and social media are private."
Caitlin: "In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government's policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship."
"Either (A) corporations are indeed private organizations separate from the government, in which case the people need to get money out of politics and government agencies out of Silicon Valley so they can start acting like it, and insist that their owners can't be dragged out on to the Senate floor and instructed on what they can and can't do with their business, or (B) these new media platforms get treated like the government agencies they function as, and the people get all the First Amendment protection that comes with it."
Caitlin, I always appreciate the insightful things you have to say. I only wish you would stand on your own and speak your mind without attempting to appease the left and asking for their approval. Who cares what they think. There are colossal idiots on both sides. We are all int this together.
Here is an article about censorship and the culprits are the liberal leaning media, technology sites, The person you “dislike” is the one petitioning for Assange and it is a Democratic senator cheering the media titans on.
So I will say it again, “we are all in this together” I am an independent who used to be a member of the Republican party and when you say; “things disgruntled right-wingers want to hear”, I am not sure exactly what you are talking about?
What defines a “right-winger”? Are all the neocons right-wingers? Not true today. Are the right-wingers the one’s who push for war? Does believing 9\11 was a false flag make a person a right-winger?
I guess what I am trying to say is that even though I have never watched Alex Jones show my general impression is that he and you have more in common than you would like to admit. That perhaps you have a common foe. When I did happen to listen to him he was always using the word, “oligarch”
So again what are the things “disgruntled right-wingers want to hear” that Alex gives to his audience .
To be fair his channel is pretty hard on “liberals” Then again this has been the year of epic liberal insanity, hypocrisy and hate.
When I see you use the word “left-winger” instead of pushing all the misdeeds of the left off on “oligarchs”, “corporations” and “intelligence services” I will know you are ready to really fight.
One last time, “we are all in this together” What really are the issues, the big issues front and center? Please define for me a “right-winger” and how this relates to those issues “front and center”?
I guess what I am tying to convey is that the times have changed. The last I saw it was low 20’s for Republican membership, low 30’s for Democrats and High 40’s for independents.
The people being labeled “right-wingers” are not the same people who were labeled “right-wingers” just say 20 years ago.
Yes there is that religious Christian segment for whom abortion is a main topic of contention. These people by and large though do not worry about the, “sociopathic, ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchs” They have been waiting even hoping for “Armageddon” for a long time so Jesus can carry them off.
When you say “right-winger” I think the real issue is that, you take in a large chunk of the 40+ % of Independents. Many of those like me may have no Religions affiliation or it is not as prominent.
Many of the issues we espouse can overlap with those of yours. I used to celebrate Cindy Sheehan as did many on alternative sites.
What is it then that defines this wing of the right wing? I believe many are pro 2nd amend., I believe many see the extreme left to be full on insanity, hypocrisy, hate, manipulation and basically asall round worthless as the religious right seems to be.
Define the issues that you feel important to the alternative media of which you are a part. I believe you will see you have more in common with those in the middle many of whom you may classify as “|right wing”
In short you need to redefine what a “liberal” stands for or join us here in the middle
For those out there who believe that in a world populated by billions of the most dangerous predators know to man, humans. On a planet with a history of perpetual war and genocide. Where governments abuse power often with horrific results about which they blog and lament endlessly, why; here’s the kicker, why we should seek to disarm the public as a first order of priority. Please just tell me why?
"Right now the social engineers are double-dipping in a way that will eventually give the alliance of corporate plutocrats and secretive government agencies the ability to fully control the public's access to ideas and information."
This. It's all about the control of ideas and information. It's why they want internet control and censorship. Control the narrative. If you can't talk about a revolution how can you organize one? If you disrupt the social media networks you're disrupting social networks, and if people can't communicate or organize or share ideas you've effectively silenced them and you can control the people before they get to be a problem.
Honestly this mass social media purge actually seemed a little like Bangladesh recently where the government shut down and censored websites and the internet so the student protests and government abuse wouldn't get filmed and shared.
The other issue is that these different corporations have now launched a coordinated assault to silence non-mainstream voices. Where before you could get banned on one platform and share your message on another, now these main platforms are working together (with government) to censor any voices or ideas that are not their own. And you can be sure that they'll target the soft targets or outliers (Jones) to get the people on side and then they'll go all out on the control and censorship.