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Censorship Is The Last Gasp Of The Liberal Class

November 14, 2021 Daniel Haiphong, Mintpress News. , , ,
On November 8, 2021, Twitter locked my account for a period of one day for responding to corporate media darling and Russiagate fanatic Keith Olbermann’s slanderous reply to journalist Wyatt Reed’s coverage of the Nicaraguan election. The flagged tweet simply restated Olbermann’s question, replacing “whore for a dictator” with “whoring for the American oligarchy.” Twitter demanded that I delete the tweet or send a time-consuming, lengthy appeal with no assurances as to if or when my sentence in “Twitter jail” would end. This prompted me to delete the tweet and wait for the 12-hour suspension to end. Keith Olbermann’s account went unscathed. This isn’t Olbermann’s first go-round with censorship.

Newly Released Documents Expose US Meddling In Venezuelan Elections

November 7, 2021 Kit Klarenberg, Resumen. , , ,
America’s interference in the electoral process in Venezuela is laid bare in a series of files that reveal how Washington provided significant investment to train political activists in campaigning effectively online. Documents released to researchers under the US Freedom of Information Act have revealed how US intelligence fronts weaponized social media to promote Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, and assist their election to parliament, thus laying the foundations for Washington’s appointment of Juan Guaido as the country’s leader in January 2019. The files indicate that in October 2013, seven months after the death of popular socialist President Hugo Chavez, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a US intelligence front that funds and supports political parties abroad, was provided almost $300,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a US government agency avowedly created to do overtly what the CIA had previously done covertly – for a program titled ‘Venezuela: Improved Training and Communications Skills for Political Activists’.

Meet The Nicaraguans Facebook Falsely Branded Bots Days Before Elections

November 3, 2021 Ben Norton, The Grayzone. , , ,
Just days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, top social media platforms censored top Nicaraguan news outlets and hundreds of journalists and activists who support their country’s leftist Sandinista government. The politically motivated campaign of Silicon Valley censorship amounted to a massive purge of Sandinista supporters one week before the vote. It followed US government attacks on the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections, and Washington’s insistence that it will refuse to recognize the results.

Meta Deletes Over 1,000 Nicaraguan Accounts Days Before Election

November 2, 2021 Morgan Artyukhina, Sputnik News. , , , , ,
On Monday, Ben Nimmo, the head of Facebook-turned-Meta’s global threat intelligence strategy, announced that the social media giant had taken down what he claimed was a “a troll farm run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party.” The takedown included 937 Facebook accounts, 140 Pages, 24 Groups and 363 Instagram accounts in Nicaragua. The Meta report claimed the accounts were “one of the most cross-government troll operations we’ve disrupted to date, with multiple state entities participating in this activity at once,” but primarily run by employees of the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and the Post (TELCOR) in Managua. “Additional smaller clusters of fake accounts were run from other government institutions, including the Supreme Court and the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute,” the report said.

CIA And DoD-Connected Organizations Mapping WikiLeaks Supporters

October 27, 2021 Talk Liberation. , , ,
For Julian Assange and those closest to him, the journey to the Royal Courts of Justice this week has been arduous and fraught with nail-biting intrigue and danger. Scheduled to appear on October 27 and 28, Assange will be subjected to a US appeal against an earlier judgement by a lower Court that found in his favor. While the US attempt to strike down the previous finding again places Assange in grave peril, this time the passing months have played in his favor, as growing support for the WikiLeaks publisher has invigorated and swelled the numbers of various grassroots campaigns demanding his freedom. Assange’s lawyers will arrive armed with statements in support by 25 leading press freedom and human rights organizations, calling in unison for an immediate end to the more than decade-long multi-jurisdictional lawfare waged against the Australian journalist.

Misinformation’s Deadly Profit Motive

July 24, 2021 Jessica González and Carmen Scurato, Common Dreams. , , ,
"When it comes to misinformation, not sharing is caring," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said during a White House press briefing last week. His advisory offers a detailed account of the ways that the spread of health mis- and disinformation has flooded communities with lies. Health misinformation was deadly prior to the rise of internet platforms, but the problem is proliferating in new ways because of the technology these companies use to extract and exploit our demographic and behavioral data.

The Israel Narrative Is Crumbling

May 11, 2021 Caitlin Johnstone. , , ,
Social media is teeming with viral video footage of police assaulting peaceful worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, of Israelis cheering and chanting “Yimach shemam (may their names be erased)” at the sight of a fire near the mosque, of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian protesters using the signature knee-on-neck maneuver made famous by the murder of George Floyd, many of which have millions of views. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are putting out statements explicitly condemning Israel as the aggressor in these attacks, and the White House is facing some actual adversarial journalism for once regarding its refusal to denounce the killing of Palestinian children and its absurd position that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves.

@HoodCommunist Twitter Ban Shows Why Offline Organizing Is Important

May 2, 2021 Lisa Snowden-McCray, The Real News. , , ,
Erica Ryan, one of the members of the Hood Communist collective, says that the group’s suspension from Twitter shows just how important on-the-ground, in-person organizing really is. Ryan spoke to The Real News Network by phone on April 2, a few days after the suspension took place.  The Hood Communist website covers news, opinion, and theory. Although their contributors all also do other forms of movement work, they are all bound together by what they call Principles of Unity: African unity, anti-Imperialism, decolonization, self determination and right to self defense, anti-patriarchy, abolition, and no ‘dear white people articles.’ At the time it was suspended, @hoodcommunist had over 30,000 followers. 

How Corporate America Supports Racism, Hatred And Exploitation

April 10, 2021 Lee Camp, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
If you’ve been paying even a modicum of attention to the world at large, you’ve noticed that white supremacists constitute a bit of a problem in America. They led an insurrection at our Capitol recently. They’ve been involved in many mass shootings. I, along with many others, was nearly killed by one a few years ago in Charlottesville, Va.after he tried to murder as many peaceful protesters as possible. Our police forces are brimming with white supremacist assholes. And I think they had a popular TV show about ducks and beards not too long ago.  So I believe we can all admit that there are large groups of racist pricks wandering around our country — usually armed, rarely friendly. Everyone knows it.

Content Control

April 3, 2021 Nicole Froio, Dissent. , , ,
Historically, the state and religion have been the institutions that control what people can and cannot say, punishing people for their thoughts, for their actions, and for their words. Silicon Valley companies have emerged as a third institution. They have put forth a new set of parameters. On their platforms, the people who make the decisions about our speech are not people that we elected, or that we trust for their faith, but people like Mark Zuckerberg. They surround themselves with “yes” people. In the early days when Facebook was taking up this role, the rooms where decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be said were more diverse than I thought they would be, at least in terms of gender. But there was a lot less diversity in other ways. Most policymakers come from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds and many are Ivy League graduates.

Enforcing Orthodoxy

March 9, 2021 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. , , ,
YouTube’s decision to remove a Consortium News CN Live! segment on Feb. 24 formidably takes its place among many such incidents involving numerous social media carriers and the enterprises that use them to disseminate information. The video-sharing platform, which has been a Google property since 2006, subsequently rejected an appeal lodged by Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News. Lauria has since published extensively on these events, and his commentaries are readily available. The webcast in question is not: Silicon Valley technicians of no discernible qualifications in such matters still prevent you from seeing it. There is a lot of this around, and by all indications there is a lot more coming. It is time, then, to sit up and look squarely at the grave threats with which a creeping, apple-pie authoritarianism now faces us.

‘Disintegration’ Of Political System Helps Explain Rising Censorship

March 6, 2021 Mohamed Elmaazi, Sputnik News. , , ,
Increased social media and tech censorship must be understood in the wider context of the establishment desperately seeking to hold on to what used to be called "the vital centre", a US-based author and economist tells Sputnik. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author, and founder of the non-profit Democracy At Work. Recent Facebook posts made by Democracy at Work were blocked from being shared via the social media platform, adding to the growing list of censorship and quasi-censorship that has become commonplace online. Professor Wolff's weekly show Economic Update is syndicated on over 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. In a detailed interview with Sputnik, he explained why such behaviour by internet giants must be understood as part of a wider collapse of the economic system, and the attempts of those who already hold power to reaffirm and consolidate their ever weakening position.

A Common Platform: Reimagining Data And Platforms

February 7, 2021 Thomas Hanna, Mathew Lawrence and Nils Peters, The Next System. , , ,
On October 20, 2020, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust action against Google, the first step in what might be one of the biggest anti-monopoly cases of this century. With Google controlling more than an 87% share of the U.S. search market and its parent company, Alphabet, now one of the largest and most valuable companies in history, the move is likely long overdue. Yet Google/Alphabet is not alone. Just weeks later, the European Commission formally accused Amazon of breaking EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in online retail markets. At this point, it is relatively uncontroversial to point out that “Big Tech” giants like Google and Amazon increasingly dominate our economies and wield tremendous influence over our culture, social interactions, and political systems.

Facebook Purges Left-Wing Pages And Individuals

January 25, 2021 Andre Damon, WSWS. , , ,
On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred. At least a half dozen leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This included the public account of Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and the personal account of Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site.

Snowden Warns Against Trump Social Media Ban

January 10, 2021 Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. , , ,
NSA whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden has cautioned the public against celebrating President Trump’s recent social media ban. “I know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like ‘YAAAAS,’ which, like — I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,” he wrote on Twitter.  Both Facebook and Twitter announced they would prevent the president from using their services in the light of his incitement of the storming of the Capitol Building on Wednesday. Twitter has since reversed its decision. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was adamant that Trump would not be allowed to use his platform.
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