FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/silicon-valley-corporations-are-taking-control-of-history-501c47f0e55b

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and
political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform
disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had
locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and
harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in
place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder
or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the
event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

    “This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or
claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said
of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the
Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural
disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which
support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not
in the least bit surprising.

    The US government thought police at Twitter locked journalist
Danny Haiphong @SpiritofHo's account, threatening to suspend him
because he contradicted the Western propaganda narrative on Tiananmen,
calling it "abuse".

    There is only "free speech" for US regime propagandists here
pic.twitter.com/t9CeCGIBeK
    — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 5, 2022

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western
narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June
of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary
Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness.
But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon
Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial
historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act
as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining
steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo
chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this
recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against
Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative
management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago,
NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help
people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in
reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who
question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The
Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships
with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders
Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as
“imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its
operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s
claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014
US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard
itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green
check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article
that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding
the country from the news.”

    US State-Affiliated NewsGuard Targets Consortium News
https://t.co/pAT3ZofeNw
    — Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) June 3, 2022

Then you’ve got Wikipedia, which blacklists the same sites as
NewsGuard and whose operatives run relentless smear campaigns on
anti-imperialist voices, thereby guaranteeing a view of history that
is wildly tilted in the favor of empire-authorized narratives. Jimmy
Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, also happens to serve on
NewsGuard’s advisory board.

This idea that anyone can ever be an impartial arbiter of objective
reality is logically fallacious and is invalidated by facts in
evidence. It is clear that imposing regulations on people’s efforts to
understand world events on the platforms where people have come to
congregate to share ideas and information will necessarily lead to an
information ecosystem that is skewed to the benefit of whatever power
structure is imposing those regulations. When that power structure is
an alliance of oligarchs and government proxies whose interests are
served by the ongoing dominance of the US-centralized empire, the
information ecosystem will be biased in favor of that empire.

The most impressive feat of engineering in the 21st century has been
of the “social” variety. The social engineering necessary to
continually keep people confused and blinkered about what’s going on
in the world despite a sudden influx of information availability is
one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of
civilization, despite its depraved and destructive nature.

The empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its
creation. On one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and
information gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which
it likes, but on the other it allows for the unprecedented
democratization of information, which it doesn’t like.

Its answer to this quandary has been to come up with “fact checking”
services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting
“misinformation” (with “facts” and “information” defined as “whatever
advances imperial interests”). That’s all we’re seeing with
continually expanding online censorship policies, and with
government-tied oligarchic narrative management operations like
NewsGuard.