FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread
grarpamp
grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun Jan 30 01:43:37 PST 2022
Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/censorship-by-algorithm-does-far-more-damage-than-conventional-censorship-882b94556125
[89]Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Journalist Jonathan Cook has [90]a new blog post out on his experience
with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic
suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content
creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western
narratives over the last few years.
“My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook
writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now,
as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the
hundreds. ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory.”
“I won’t be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like a
small star in the night sky — one among millions — gradually
eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will
disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.”
Cook [91]says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when
a [92]major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to
eliminate “fake news” from their platforms and soon saw tech
executives [93]brought before the US Senate and told that they must
“quell information rebellions” and come up with a mission statement
expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord”
online.
My latest: Is it already too late to say goodbye? Because those
independent voices in the new media you so value will wither and decay
like autumn leaves once they have no audience
[94]https://t.co/X6wbmpgHBe
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) [95]January 22, 2022
Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since
9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied
institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of
establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that
point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the
narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve [96]lied to us
about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed.
[97][IMG]
By mid-2017 independent media outlets were [98]already reporting across
ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of
viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people
who were searching for the subjects they reported on.
“In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works — I
have 330,000 followers there but they’ve stopped showing my posts to
many people,” Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp [99]tweeted in January
2018.
“I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB
unsubscribes people without their knowledge — so my total number never
increases.”
I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well, and
saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It
wasn’t until I [100]started using [101]mailing lists and giving
indie media outlets [102]blanket permission to republish all my content
that I was able to grow my audience at all.
And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively
censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to
disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors rightist
voices, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet [103]admitted in
2020 to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the
CEO of Google-owned YouTube [104]acknowledged that the platform uses
algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing
“borderline content” not considered authoritative,
which [105]apparently even includes just marginally
establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook
spokeswoman Lauren Svensson [106]said in 2018 that if the platform’s
fact-checkers
([107]including the [108]state-funded establishment [109]narrative
management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been
posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the
distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on
Facebook.”
In case anyone wants to know how Face book suppression works - I have
330,000 followers there but they've stopped showing my posts to many
ppl. I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB
unsubscribes ppl w/out their knowledge - so my total numbr never
increases
— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@LeeCamp) [110]January 27, 2018
People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed
from a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such
brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. [111]The goal is to
normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful will push
for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you
dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is
entirely irrelevant; it’s not about them, it’s about expanding and
normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied
speech platforms.
But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is
censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much
real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and
information which aren’t authorized by the powerful are being actively
hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the
powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures
that public consciousness remains chained to the
establishment [112]narrative matrix.
It doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you
speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say
whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.
That’s the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the
western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By
allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources
everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along
that path as in for example Google’s [113]research grants from the CIA
and NSA), it’s possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident
information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.
At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, when asked by Republican
Senator Mike Lee of Utah to provide the name of one left-wing “high
profile person or entity” that has been censored by [114]#Google,
Pichai named the [115]#WSWS.[116]https://t.co/Nq4vXN4S4s
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) [117]November 4, 2020
You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for
videos which don’t align with the official narratives of western
governments and media lately. That search function used to work like
magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find
the information you’re looking for unless you’re trying to find out
what the US State Department wants you to think. It’s the same with
Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate
what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information
bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of
interaction like Twitter as well.
The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and
information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and
propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their
content seen and heard by people, and to make their going viral altogether
impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public
scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while
silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make
noncompliant voices “disappear from view so slowly you won’t even
notice,” as Cook put it.
The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be
rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between
nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality,
oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the
public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we
can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And
that’s never going to happen as long as information is locked down in
the way that it is.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more
people get their information about what’s happening in the world from
online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become
one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.
* * *
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89. https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/censorship-by-algorithm-does-far-more-damage-than-conventional-censorship-882b94556125
90. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-01-22/too-late-goodbye/
91. https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1485376035193556999
92. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/08/hillary-clinton-fake-news-consequences-pizzagate
93. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/01/goog-n01.html
94. https://t.co/X6wbmpgHBe
95. https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1484948121402712077
96. https://podcastaddict.com/episode/53781281
98. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/27/goog-j27.html
99. https://twitter.com/LeeCamp/status/957346222372786176
100. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/
101. https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/
102. https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/i-permanently-release-all-copyrights-to-all-my-writing-use-any-of-it-however-you-want-9ad929b92d42
103. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
104. https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-ceo-basement-authoritative-sources/
105. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2ONsgx4Mxw
106. https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/11/media/facebook-infowars/index.html
107. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/08/atla-s08.html
108. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/donate/honor-roll-of-contributors-2019/
109. https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/atlantic-council-explains-why-we-need-to-be-propagandized-for-our-own-good-fd3470254ea5
110. https://twitter.com/LeeCamp/status/957346222372786176
111. https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/dont-underestimate-how-badly-the
112. https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing
113. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/
114. https://twitter.com/hashtag/Google
115. https://twitter.com/hashtag/WSWS
116. https://t.co/Nq4vXN4S4s
117. https://twitter.com/WSWS_Updates/status/1323992593861062660
118. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/24/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism/
119. https://www.facebook.com/CaitlinAJohnstone/
120. https://twitter.com/caitoz
121. https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue
122. https://www.youtube.com/c/CaitlinJohnstone/videos
123. https://ko-fi.com/caitlinjohnstone
124. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4445783
125. https://paypal.me/caitlinjohnstone
126. https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/books-by-caitlin-johnstone-a5a5e6f71772
127. http://caitlinjohnstone.com/
128. https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/
129. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/i-permanently-release-all-copyrights-to-all-my-writing-use-any-of-it-however-you-want-9ad929b92d42
130. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/11-things-you-should-know-about-me-and-where-im-coming-from-a6b9ddf9806e
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