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”?
You better start believing in Information War, you're in one
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.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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
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
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.
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.
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.
The Electronic Intidada - relatively small but awesome website and channel on YouTube - got hit with a weeklong ban for reasons unknown
ok so on the one hand its just their youtube channel but on the other hand this is pretty disrespectful
noticed before that their videos are very obviously hidden from search too
