I’m not one who’s prone to thinking that things ever really get much worse very quickly. I tend to be skeptical when people say that we’ve turned a corner.
But in the recent past, we’ve had the TikTok ban (clearly became an urgent issue after it became a major vehicle for challenging media narrative about Israel among young people), Twitter and Facebook clearly taking orders from the US government and banning accounts for supporting Palestine, the arrests of the Sarah Wilkinson, the Telegram guy, and the other OSINT guy arrested at Heathrow (can’t remember his name).
But for me, it’s events just in the last week that have really caught my notice. The Electronic Intidada - relatively small but awesome website and channel on YouTube - got hit with a weeklong ban for reasons unknown. The Red Stream - a small website and Telegram channel - got called out by Lucifer himself (Antony Blinken) and they got bumped from YouTube. And just the other day, Light Herself was talking about how we should arrest and charge people when they spread “Russian disinformation” (you just know libs want to arrest people for saying inflation is too high as being “Russian disinformation”).
I don’t, it feels like things have rapidly accelerated just in the last couple months. Anyone else feeling this? Or do we still have a long way to go here before we can say things have actually gotten “bad”?
alienation and centralization of all communication between people are converging to make censorship more effective then ever.
you just have to change what people see. there's so little face to face communication now you could place individuals into sealed information bubbles now
palestine is what has truly kicked this of
but all you need are bans on certain news, keyword bans, bans on discussion. our face to face communication is so limited now.
FOSS may help this but i dunno
I mean, they're dropping all subtlety with it at this point, so you may be onto it.
They have definitely been taking an increasing active role over the past decade. Russiagate sold the idea of combating "disinformation" to preserve liberal democracy to the public. In the meantime, all of the major platforms have been roped in. They collaborated in disrupting the george floyd uprising. They all removed links the the Blue Leaks. They all removed link to the Hunter Biden laptop story (who fucking cares, but they did it). There was a big purge at the start of the Ukraine-Russia war, and with the situation in Palestine you can't even use the word "Zionist" on Facebook anymore.
Unpopular opinion but The left really isn’t talking about the censorship of Hunter Biden’s penis enough
noticed before that their videos are very obviously hidden from search too
A new stage where it's just getting more obviously hypocritical - Russiagate set the stage for the Chinese software panic that's really highlighting it. Before it was just the CIA ruining someone's life or killing them for investigating elite crimes or resisting, and having backdoors for the data collection in telecom/big tech.
I've always figured Telegram was some weird NATO thing, so I figured that arrest isn't really that special. It was either knowingly or unwittingly a honeypot for a decade, by not really protecting anything while operating with relative impunity from places like Dubai, the Caribbean, and France....
In theory it's "resistable" if a lot of people were ready to replace their technology platforms with decentralized ones, with webs of trust for identity (cryptography nerd in me has to mention that we can make digital signatures today which do not necessarily authenticate a statement is from a specific person, but it's at least been made by someone that we all know, however we know each other, and federate from there if needed). Would be nice if this and other things turned into a systemic change because yeah even the meshnets and shit are still censorsable, if there's not enough resistance.
If you pay attention, like actually pay attention, and fully comprehend all the terrible shit the US state dept (and its various puppet like the EU, NATO, Israel, etc.) does on a daily, even hourly, basis... this is basically all going as expected and predicted for decades.
Not to downplay the shittiness
Yah these levels of censorship aren't new. We have basically zero footage of Iraq and Afghanistan. The US learned its lesson with Vietnam where they allowed the media to broadcast pictures of kids being hit by napalm, extrajudicial killings of communists, or monks protesting US occupation. If you try and find similar content for the Middle East, you won't. Even a photo of Americans in coffins was a scandal.
This goes back even further with Red Scares and McCarthyism. Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted by Hollywood for years despite committing zero crimes just because he was a communist. Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death on faulty evidence because being an anarchist was reason enough for a jury to convict them.
You better start believing in Information War, you're in one
They’re just bringing back the Cold War censorship. The question is if the global south will actually learn this time or continue worshipping them like they did after the first time.
I think it's a trend and those in power aren't even trying that hard to explain it in any meaningful way. Before Trump the TikTok ban would have been unthinkable. But after Trump's 2016 win - libs got Russia brain. It reminds me of the zany and awful movie "The Russians Are Coming (1966)". In the movie it's a Russian sub that ran aground and some Russian sailors on American soil. In reality in 2024 - libs are primed to think anything labeled "disinformation" is Russia trying to destroy America by spending a few $100,000 on Facebook.
And it's a bipartisan effort in DC where pols want to control the narrative like they always do but when young people can watch a continuing genocide on TikTok and it puts a crimp in their plans.
That's an amazing movie, one of my favorites, it was praised by the Soviets at the time too. Perfect satire comedy of Cold War brainworms.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I don't think it's increasing overall, it's just been changing to be more internet-focused. You have to remember that since the internet first came into the popular global stage, governments worldwide have been scrambling to get a chokehold on it.
Massively overemphasising the dangers of online sexual abusers, drug trade, "terrorist propaganda", cyberhackers, copyright etc has been the approach of most governments since the 90s, and it's absolutely worked. Despite being borderline non-existent threats, it's been the excuse governments needed to have the authority to block whatever they want and have more of a hand in any large-scale online entities. (Not to mention playing up fears of "foreign censorship" as super evil so our own looks good by comparison).
Obviously, in the 90s, it wasn't a yet major issue, because most people still watched TV news. As people have slowly gone online and turned away from traditional media, governments have simply continued to ramp up the fear of internet boogeymen to ensure they have a similar hold on internet media sources instead.
So I'd argue there's always been this strong grip on censorship, it's just as internet-goers, we're slowly seeing it migrate here from elsewhere.
Lots of people saying that Oct 7, Palestine, the genocide kicked this off.
I disagree. It kicked it into over-gear but what made it palatable for liberals was the Russiagate hoax and the concept of disinformation they've been so successfully sold from 2016 onward. That there is this cartoon villain or villains like Putin and China and so on who just have these armies of bots and trolls who conjure out of thin air as if evil sorcerers the dread disinformation which creates people (again out of thin air) who want to vote for Trump or who hate the covid vaccine, or who deny modern medicine, or who reject the imperialist narrative on Ukraine. And on and on. It broke enough brains to really get things moving. These liberals are in total denial that anything is wrong in the US, it can't be that we're in an atomized society with many left behind, with corporate lies all over, with an inconsistent, hypocritical political/economic system that breeds conspiratorial thinking or that we're founded on white supremacy and structural racism, it must be those dastardly outsiders and their false narratives and propaganda that have created all this trouble and if we get rid of them we can go back to brunch and the problems will be normal problems again like they were before.
And this is not new. I think James Baldwin was the one who said "when the south has trouble with their [black people] they blame the north, when the nation has trouble with them, they blame Russia" it's just that back then the information control was simply controlling the TV news and newspapers and there was nothing they could practically do about word of mouth campaigns, about discussions between people happening on college campuses and in various public places. But now with most discourse online and centralized behind gatekeepers the opportunity presents itself to actually institute some control.
So they were already moving this direction with the Russiagate hoax narrative and the anger and accusations towards social media for not censoring enough, it's just that Oct 7th and the loss of control of the Palestine narrative has not only panicked them but it's gotten the GOP zionists who were of course skeptical if not outright derisive of this campaign when it was just an anti-Trump thing onboard now with the need for control and a crackdown. The loss of control of the narrative on Ukraine in the global south has also significantly propelled this as we see as these arch imperialists are very frustrated with RT as Russia hasn't collapsed or been as isolated as they'd like and the war is going south in Ukraine so now it's time for blame and power-grabs.
I will never forgive the administrations of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton for strangling normalized usage of PGP in the cradle by their vicious persecution of Phil Zimmermann.
