Social-media censorship—here are the basics

Hat tip Steve Candidus

Guest Post by Jon Rappoport

Orchestrated un-creation of the fabric of free speech—this is what we’re seeing.

Several of the biggest “conservative/libertarian” figures on the Net—Alex Jones, Dennis Prager, Stefan Molyneux, among others—have recently been banned/censored by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies.

When you ask why this is happening, one obvious answer pops up right away:

These social media corporations are fulfilling desperate pleas from major news outlets, who have been losing audience, in massive chunks, to the likes of Jones, Prager, and Molyneaux.

The newspapers and TV news networks came to end of their rope. They had no solutions to their problem—so they went to Google, Facebook, and others, and said, HELP US. Meaning: Censor our competition.

On one level, understanding censorship is that simple.

But then you have to ask yourself this question: Why would Google, Facebook, and other social media giants bend to the needs of mainstream news outlets?

These social media operations are richer and bigger than mainstream news. They could easily have said: “No, we like open forums and a wide variety of opinion, and we think people should be able to deal with ideas they don’t like. We stand for an open society, and we vigorously defend the 1st Amendment.”

But they didn’t say that. Instead, they’re enacting bans and censorship. Why?

The obvious answer staring us in the face is: Google and Facebook and You Tube, for example, the largest social media corporations, are not “free companies.”

They’ve been in bed with the intelligence community for a long time, and they favor wall to wall surveillance of the population. They favor the “liberal” version of a policed State, where correct opinions are let in the door and incorrect opinions are shut down.

Let’s quickly review a bit of Facebook history:

The big infusion of cash that sent Mark Zuckerberg and his fledgling college enterprise on their way came from Accel Partners, in 2004.

Jim Breyer, head of Accel, attached a $13 million rocket to Facebook, and nothing has ever been the same.

Earlier that same year, a man named Gilman Louie joined the board of the National Venture Capital Association of America (NVCA). The chairman of NVCA? Jim Breyer. Gilman Louie happened to be the first CEO of the important CIA start-up, In-Q-Tel.

In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999, with the express purpose of funding companies that could develop technology the CIA would use to “gather data.”

That’s not the only connection between Jim Breyer and the CIA’s man, Gilman Louie. In 2004, Louie went to work for BBN Technologies, headed up by Breyer. Dr. Anita Jones also joined BBN at that time. Jones had worked for In-Q-Tel and was an adviser to DARPA, the Pentagon’s technology department that helped develop the Internet.

With these CIA/Darpa connections, it’s no surprise that Jim Breyer’s jackpot investment in Facebook is not part of the popular mythology of Mark Zuckerberg. Better to omit it. Who could fail to realize that Facebook, with its endless stream of personal data, and its tracking capability, is an ideal CIA asset?

What about Google?

Read Nafeez Ahmed’s excellent multi-part series at medium.com, “How the CIA made Google”:

“INSURGE INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we know today…The lynchpin of this story is the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.”

“Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.”

“The inside story of Google’s rise, revealed here for the first time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from its operation…”

In other words, social media aren’t banning and censoring “conservatives/libertarians” merely as a favor to their kissing cousins who run major news outlets—no, this goes much deeper.

This is the intelligence and Pentagon communities, with their attendant neo-cons and military contractors, defending their version of the “new world.”

Anyone with a large online audience, who has strong opinions which resist and run counter to this new world vision, is considered an obstacle, and a target for censorship.

The intelligence/Pentagon vision? Endless wars; endless waves of migration engendering chaos; multinational corporations free to roam the planet, set up shop in hellholes, produce their goods for relative pennies, sell those goods anywhere with no tariffs, thus undermining local economies and centralizing economic power in fewer hands; the vast expansion of surveillance and censorship (which go hand in hand); widening poverty, which makes more and more people dependent on government…

Social media censorship isn’t merely a bunch of knee-jerk liberals trying to stop ideas they don’t like. It is that, but it’s much, much, much more.

Google and Facebook are nurtured creatures of the national security state.