Censorship Is What Happens When Powerful People Get Scared

Guest Post by Michael Krieger 

 

“Only the weak hit the fly with a hammer.”

– Bangambiki Habyarimana

Anyone who tells you the recent escalation of censorship by U.S. tech giants is merely a reflection of private companies making independent decisions is either lying or dangerously ignorant.

In the case of Facebook, the road from pseudo-platform to willing and enthusiastic tool of establishment power players is fairly straightforward. It really got going earlier this year when issues surrounding egregious privacy violations in the case of Cambridge Analytica (stuff that had been going on for years) could finally be linked to the Trump campaign.  It was at this point that powerful and nefarious forces spotted an opportunity to leverage the company’s gigantic influence in distributing news and opinion for their own ends. Rather than actually hold executives to account and break up the company, the choice was made to commandeer and weaponize the platform. This is where we stand today.

Let’s not whitewash history though. These tech companies have been compliant, out of control government snitches for a long time. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’re aware of the deep and longstanding cooperation between these lackeys and U.S. intelligence agencies in the realm of mass surveillance. As such, the most recent transformation of these companies into full fledged information gatekeepers should be seen in its proper context; merely as a dangerous continuation and expansion of an already entrenched reality.

But it’s all out in the open now. Facebook isn’t even hiding the fact that it’s outsourcing much of its “fake news” analysis to the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by NATO, Gulf States and defense contractors. As reported by Reuters:

Facebook began looking for outside help amid criticism for failing to rein in Russian propaganda ahead of the 2016 presidential elections…

With scores of its own cybersecurity professionals and $40 billion in annual revenue in 2017, Facebook might not seem in need of outside help.

It doesn’t need outside help, it needs political cover, which is the real driver behind this.

But the lab and Atlantic Council bring geopolitical expertise and allow Facebook to distance itself from sensitive pronouncements. On last week’s call with reporters, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said the company should not be expected to identify or blame specific governments for all the campaigns it detects.

“Companies like ours don’t have the necessary information to evaluate the relationship between political motivations that we infer about an adversary and the political goals of a nation-state,” said Stamos, who is leaving the company this month for a post at Stanford University. Instead, he said Facebook would stick to amassing digital evidence and turning it over to authorities and researchers.

It would also be awkward for Facebook to accuse a government of wrongdoing when the company is trying to enter or expand in a market under that government’s control.

Facebook donated an undisclosed amount to the lab in May that was enough, said Graham Brookie, who runs the lab, to vault the company to the top of the Atlantic Council’s donor list, alongside the British government.

Facebook employees said privately over the past several months that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to outsource many of the most sensitive political decisions, leaving fact-checking to media groups and geopolitics to think tanks. The more he succeeds, the fewer complications for Facebook’s expansion, the smaller its payroll, and the more plausible its positioning as a neutral platform. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

With that in mind go ahead and check out the Atlantic Council’s donor list and all the shady characters on its board.

Now that it’s been established that Facebook is in fact censoring based on advice provided by former spooks and other assorted establishment charlatans, let’s talk about what this means. I think there are two major takeaways.

First and foremost, the entire push to make arbitrary de-platforming by tech giants the new norm proves the establishment is scared to death. The very powerful folks accustomed to manipulating and shaping the world via narrative creation aren’t terrified about what Alex Jones says, they’re terrified that it’s popular. The establishment “elites” are in such denial about the consequences of the world they created, all they can do is spastically attack symptoms. Trump didn’t divide U.S. society and Alex Jones didn’t cause our widespread (and entirely justifiably) distrust in institutions; the status quo system did that via its spectacular failures. Trump’s election and Alex Jones’ popularity are merely symptoms of an incredibly corrupt and failed status quo paradigm, the stewards of which continually refuse to take a look in the mirror, accept blame and reform.

The way I see it, two key events of the 21st century directly led to the situation we find ourselves in currently. The launching of the Iraq war based on false evidence spread by intelligence agencies, politicians and the media, and the decision to bail out bankers and protect them from jail in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Combined, these two things created an environment of anger and distrust in which nearly anything becomes possible politically and socially. Trump and Alex Jones are symptoms of a failing society, not the root causes of it.

If I’m right about this, censorship of such voices by SilIcon Valley billionaires will backfire spectacularly. Alex Jones has now been made a martyr by tech oligarchs and deep state think tanks, which gives him more street cred than he had before. De-platforming does nothing to the demand side of the equation when it comes to his content, as we saw with his Infowars app soaring in the charts soon after the purge. If people want to find Alex Jones and Infowars, they will find it. Moreover, other communities are beginning to wake up to how dangerous all of this is. For example, last week we witnessed a growing number of Bitcoiners create accounts at decentralized Twitter-alternative Mastodon in case Jack Dorsey decides to step up censorship there.

Ultimately, it’s safer for society to have open public forums where all ideas — whether you consider them dangerous and crazy or not — can be openly expressed alongside each other. That way we can see what’s out there and debate or debunk them in front of large and diverse audiences.

This is 2018 and de-platforming popular content won’t make it go away. It’ll just shift it over into areas of the internet you can’t see, where it’ll fester and grow stronger over time in even more intense and radicalized echo chambers. You’ll think it’s gone from society because it’s been safely cleansed from your corporate-government Facebook timeline, but it may grow even stronger in the shadows. This is particularly the case in a nation dominated by an entrenched, corrupt and unaccountable elitist class. One that refuses to confront the reality of its monumental failures, and instead chooses to self-interestedly obsess over what are just symptoms of a decadent empire in decline.

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anarchyst
anarchyst

It started with “those who we dare not question”… Remember, “to know who rules over you, simply find out what you are not supposed to criticize.
–Monika Schaefer
–Ursula Haverbeck
–and many others who are imprisoned for questioning the jewish holocaust ™.
These two elderly women are imprisoned in maximum security prisons in Germany for daring to question “that which may not be questioned”–the so-called jewish “holocaust ™”.
The kangaroo court “trials” under which these two women (and many others) have been convicted utilize a doctrine known as “judicial notice” in which TRUTH CANNOT BE ENTERED INTO EVIDENCE if it runs counter to “commonly accepted beliefs”, EVEN IF THESE COMMONLY ACCEPTED BELIEFS ARE WRONG.
We have entered into a new age of “inquisition” in which those who have “made the rules” are running scared and “trying to put the toothpaste back in to the tube”, especially when it comes to “all things holocaust ™.
Attention: jewish holocaust ™ promoters–your lies and fabrications are finally being exposed for what they are…the biggest scam in 20th century history.Your scam is finally coming to an end…
Jews have been pogromed out of 109 countries in history. Maybe its time for 110…

DWill
DWill

The Holocaust is the one and only event in history whose official story it is illegal to question in most “free” secular western democracies.

Anyone with a functioning rational mind and a good amount of healthy skepticism should raise an eyebrow at this.

Holocaustdeprogrammingcourse.com

Brassilach
Brassilach

Watch Dean Irebodd’s “One Third of the Holocaust”

This documentary explains how the German wartime camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec (all in Poland) were not death camps, as is usually claimed. It thereby debunks one third of the Holocaust.

The movie asks questions like, “Would the Germans have really put a fence made out of tree branches around a deathcamp?” Answer: “Uh, no, that’s silly.” And would they have then conducted a huge burning operation inside this flammable fence?

This documentary was banned by YouTube, and if you’re in Europe you’ll have to watch it over a VPN

It comes in 30 episodes, with a total length of 4 hours 15 min.

steve
steve
Hollywood Rob

And then there is this…

22winmag - Q is a Psyop and Trump is lead actor
22winmag - Q is a Psyop and Trump is lead actor

Police scarecrows is the takeaway.

Grizzly Bare
Grizzly Bare

These tech giants are all owned by the US intelligence community, yet the leftist press like to come out talking like libertarian anarchists in defense of them, claiming they are private companies and have the right to refuse service to anyone they want too. A pretty huge flip-flop from what the miscreants were saying about a certain bakery that refused to bake a gay wedding cake.

nobody
nobody

F.ace
B.ook
I.nc

22winmag - Say no to doom porn and NSAcoin stories
22winmag - Say no to doom porn and NSAcoin stories

Antitrust and such.

Trump’s SCOTUS has been “fixed” alrighty.

http://mileswmathis.com/supreme.pdf

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