FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Oct 24 21:06:57 PDT 2022


Trump Won.


The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-us-government-sees-silicon-valley-as-part-of-its-propaganda-machine-2e371b38796
https://archive.ph/Lsrif
https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1583425927622852608

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/imperial-narrative-control-has-five
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/16/biden-administration-completely-kills-the-its-a-private-company-so-its-not-censorship-argument/
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/15/more-escalations-in-online-censorship/
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/defending-freedom-and-democracy-sure
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/20/twitter-to-ramp-up-censorship-of-misinformation-about-the-ukraine-war/
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/dont-underestimate-how-badly-the
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-tiktok-white-house/
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/30/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse/
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1415725320381079569
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/when-billionaires-and-the-government
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10/11/the-science-of-propaganda-is-still-being-developed-and-advanced/
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/censorship-by-algorithm-does-far
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national
security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the
plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part
because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly
stance.”

Bloomberg reports:

    Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US
should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security
reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink
satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

    US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to
stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it
had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his
increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that
outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They
are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign
investors.

The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is
reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of
Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for
years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign
investors there before.

    Scoop: Biden admin officials are discussing whether US should
subject some of @elonmusk’s ventures to national security reviews,
including his deal for Twitter Inc., and the Starlink satellite
network, sources tell @SalehaMohsin and me. @BloombergTV
pic.twitter.com/pZx1As8RUZ
    — Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 21, 2022

“Officials in the US government and intelligence community are
weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the
federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One
possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and
operations for national security risks, they said.”

“Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent
weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut
financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg.
“His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US
and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”

“If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national
security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that
he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in
recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg
scoop.

Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden
administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that
the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But
how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House
from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that
they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial
commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that
the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online
platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably
“Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that
the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company
if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies,
many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:

    BREAKING: Biden is considering blocking Musk’s Twitter deal (due
to close 10/28), worried by his threat to stop supplying Starlink to
Ukraine and his Russia-friendly “peace proposals.” The Committee on
Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) CAN nix the deal! 🧵
    — Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) October 21, 2022

This just says so much about how the US government views the function
of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more
and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater
and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned,
Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And
empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying
attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship
since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing
expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well
underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to
people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social
media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to
talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those
who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that
the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance
board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online
content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic
posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted
that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the
last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.

It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley
tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control
system.

The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater
degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science
of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest
propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is
being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via
algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops
like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more
and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to
the new.

Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and
Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the
military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the
purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the
would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is
just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to
control human understanding and perception.


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