Social media censorship — time to start chopping Oligarchy's repressing electrons

© 2020 Peter Free

 

17 October 2020

 

 

Consider Big Tech's now routine social media-sponsored censorship

 

These platforms squash what they do not like. That strategy is aimed at controlling the public.

 

This essentially turns us into caged sheep, whom the Great American Oligarchy can continue to bleed for parasitically derived profit:

 

Picture your unmoving furry self:

 

wrapped in confining wire

 

with

 

plastic lines sucking your bodily fluids out

 

and

 

into a group of partying Fat Cats' mouths.

 

 

The latest obvious example

 

By now, you may have heard about Twitter and Facebook's attempt to censor (out of existence) a New York Post story.

 

This was the Post's exposé of (very questionably discovered) Hunter Biden emails — allegedly about his (very obviously) quasi-corrupt abuse of then Vice President Joe Biden's political position — for Hunter's personal profit in Ukraine.

 

The always astute Glenn Greenwald explained what happened, here:

 

 

Glenn Greenwald, Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor, The Intercept (15 October 2020)

 

 

Click on the above link, if you need to refresh your memory about who did what to whom.

 

 

Twitter and Facebook evidently decided that what was bad . . .

 

. . . for the Establishment and the Deep State-approved candidate Joe Biden was also bad for them.

 

They both initially tried to squash Twitter and Facebook mentions of the New York Post article completely out of existence.

 

 

Liberty's relationship to free speech

 

Corporate-sponsored censorship is not illegal in the United States. But it should be, when monopolistic and quasi-monopolistic platforms do it.

 

Their reach, regarding controlling speech, is too broad and far too deep.

 

Think about it:

 

 

Where does one go when one wants to reach an audience of even small size?

 

The Internet's social media.

 

 

Of media censorship . . .

 

. . . Glenn Greenwald observed that:

 

 

Twitter is not opposed to hacked materials and Facebook is not opposed to dubiously sourced stories. They are opposed to such things only when such stories anger powerful factions.

 

Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

 

[I]t is exclusively the voices on the fringes and the margins, the dissidents, those who reside outside of the factions of power who will be subjected to this silencing.

 

Mainstream political and media voices, and the U.S. Government and its allies, will be fully free to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation without ever being subjected to these illusory “rules.”

 

Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation.

 

© 2020 Glenn Greenwald, Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor, The Intercept (15 October 2020)

 

 

The entire point to Free Speech is . . .

 

. . . to be able to yell from the sidelines, even when the Prevailing Herd does not like one's message.

 

The (historically entire) purpose to permitting against-the-grain expression is that we know (deep down) that the Mainstream often proves to be wrong — or too narrowly self-interested.

 

Consequently, it makes no beneficial societal sense to repress Government censorship and simultaneously permit (or even encourage) the even more massively suppressing Corporatist Squash Boot.

 

 

The moral? — Time to bust up and regulate

 

Unless, y'all enjoy being caged and blood-sucked.