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:
Continue reading “Social-media censorship—here are the basics”
Robert Bronsdon (Hollywood Rob) August 2018
We now see the organs of the state moving to eliminate freedom from our country. Some argue that companies are free to do whatever they want, but this is clearly a misrepresentation of what is happening. These are not companies. They are fully owned subsidiaries of government. They do not do the governments bidding out of fear; they do it because they must. But what is this government of which you speak? We all seem to think of the government as a thing. It is not a thing. It is a group of people who have banded together for their own protection and profit.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
The other day, YouTube and Facebook and several other inter-related social media platforms banned Alex Jones – the founder of Prison Planet and InfoWars. The reason given isn’t that Alex is a “conspiracy” theorist – the ancient charge – but chiefly that he is a purveyor of “hate” speech.
What this really means is that the powers that be hate the things Alex speaks about – his political incorrectness – and can no longer abide his being free to speak about such things.
Having locked down colleges, the workplace and most other places, the very last place where it is still possible to openly express non-orthodox views – and to hear and read them – is online.
And now that is to be locked down, too.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Franz Kafka wrote about the tyranny of the unknowable. He even gave it his name, Kafkaesque. Well, here’s an example of just that.
Below, you’ll see a copy of a Publisher Policy Violation sent my way via the nexus of online evil itself. Evil, because it has its boot on the throat of every independent media outlet online. Violate its Publisher Policies and your site will be blacklisted – and not just in the advertising way. Also in the search engine way and – if you are really naughty – in the page-won’t-load way.
Authored by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.com,
With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data breaches’ and privacy violations, even though what happened with Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model, it’s easy to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting just as much – if not more – of our personal info.
Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in “surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports actually suggest that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.
Curious about just how much of his data Google had, web developer Dylan Curran says he downloaded his Google data file, which is offered by the company in a hub called “My Account.”
Continue reading “Google’s File On You Is 10 Times Bigger Than Facebook’s – Here’s How To View It”
By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
― George Orwell, “1984”, part 3, chapter 3
In the eight days following Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Election win, I wrote a series of three (3) articles based upon Charles Dicken’s literary classic, “A Tale of Two Cities”. The first piece entitled “Best of Times Worst of Times” was a play-by-play of my own election night experience. The second installment, entitled “A Tale of Two Cities” drew some comparisons between our modern times with Dickens’ major themes of “duality, revolution, and resurrection” against the backdrop of the burgeoning warfare between the aristocratic class and those of the peasants during the French Revolution. And the third and final article concluded with these words:
Continue reading “Place Your Bets, Hedge Your Bets, Winner Takes All”
YouTube has ‘quarantined’ a hard-hitting video on Europe’s migrant crisis released by Poland’s conservative government, as part the platform’s crackdown on “hate speech and violent extremism”.
The Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration’s video has been placed in a controversial state designed by YouTube to limit access to videos it says contain “supremacist” or “extremist” content, but which don’t break any of the platform’s rules.
Opening with dramatic scenes of migrants swarming into Europe, the video highlights EU leaders’ insistence that the newcomers be spread throughout the continent, and forced even on unwilling nations through compulsory quotas.
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”
Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.
When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto: “Don’t be evil.” It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.
In recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has recruited and cultivated law professors who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products.
It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.
Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways. First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.
– From Zephyr Teachout’s powerful arcticle: Google Is Coming After Critics in Academia and Journalism. It’s Time to Stop Them.
Continue reading “Has Google Become A Major Threat To Democracy In America?”
