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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.

Socialise Big Tech

December 27, 2020 Thomas Hanna and Michael Brennan, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
On Wednesday 9 December, the Federal Trade Commission and forty-eight states and territories sued Facebook for its illegal social networking monopoly after an extensive investigation. The antitrust action seeks to break up the company by forcing it to divest two of its major business lines, Instagram and WhatsApp. This latest event comes hot on the heels of October’s historic investigation by the House Judiciary Committee—which detailed how dominant platform companies monopolise markets, abuse their power, and explicitly and purposely violate laws and regulations—and another lawsuit by the Department of Justice against Google for illegal anticompetitive actions protecting its search and advertising monopolies.

Canadian Military Wants To Use Propaganda, Other Techniques Domestically

November 4, 2020 David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen. , , ,
The Canadian Forces wants to establish a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians, according to documents obtained by this newspaper. The plan comes on the heels of the Canadian Forces spending more than $1 million to train public affairs officers on behaviour modification techniques of the same sort used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, as well as a controversial and bizarre propaganda training mission in which the military forged letters from the Nova Scotia government to warn the public that wolves were wandering in the province.

On Contact: The Disintegrating Media Landscape

November 1, 2020 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to journalist and author Matt Taibbi about the rapidly disintegrating media landscape and the consequences of that disintegration. Taibbi has been following developments since Twitter and Facebook blocked a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden's son Hunter, with Twitter blocking the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. The overt censorship is emblematic of the widening and dangerous partisan divide into information that hurts or promotes one political faction over another, and is now infecting nearly all news organizations.

Biden And Liberal Censorship

October 24, 2020 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
We can thank liberals for turning social media platforms into the biggest champions of censorship in the country. Frustrated in the wake of the 2016 election debacle, they rushed to cover up for their own failures and used Russia as their scapegoat. Russiagate began even while the campaign was still in progress, as Hillary Clinton tried unsuccessfully to label Donald Trump a “Putin puppet” and worked with surveillance state insiders to make their tall tale appear real. The country has never recovered from this scheme. The Democrats repeated incessantly that foreign interference lost them the election.

Court Refuses To Block Information On Who Police Targeted In Social Media

June 22, 2020 By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, The Appeal. , , ,
Massachusetts’s highest court will not block the disclosure of police reports that could show the Boston police department has targeted Black and Latinx men for surveillance on social media.  Boston attorney Josh Raisler Cohn, who represents a man charged with several gun violations, began seeking the police reports in November 2018 to determine if the police have surreptitiously used the social media service, Snapchat, to target people of color. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins appealed Ullmann’s order, but her office’s petition was denied. After an unsuccessful appeal to a single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, the commonwealth appealed again to the full Supreme Judicial Court. The full court denied Rollins’s petition.

Chop Chop: The Liberatory Militancy Of Guillotine Memes

February 28, 2020 Tim Bruno, Roarmag.org ,
They dropped suddenly. Anarchists tattooed guillotines down their arms. Outside the office of Virginia Governor and sometimes blackface performer Ralph Northam, protesters chanted lyrics by hip-hop group The Coup: “We got the guillotine, / you better run.” Edgy internet posters memed portraits of history’s great fools and losers next to images of the “choppy boi,” asking, “Who would win?
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