Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.
Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?
[...] Accounts are vanishing quickly, including some popular Trump supporter accounts. I myself have lost hundreds of followers on Twitter in the last few hours, and I've seen people saying they lost a lot more.
It also wasn't just Trump supporters; leftist accounts are getting suspended too. The online left is hopefully learning that cheering for Twitter "banning fascists" irrationally assumes that (A) their purges are only banning fascists and (B) they are limiting their bans to your personal definition of fascists. There is no basis whatsoever for either of these assumptions. [...]
[...] "The post 9/11 era is over," Slotkin [CIA 'analyst'] tweeted while sharing a clip of her appearance. "The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don't reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside." [...]
This is the urge to bring the draconian policies from abroad home.
[...] Supporting the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is suicidal. [...]
See full linked article, not a long read.
Remember, Biden loves to brag about being the author of the first Patriot Act. We are 100% going to get another one that's much worse and seeks to clamp down on "dis-information" which will mean Russia hysteria and Sinophobia being used to justify silencing of any opinions too far outside the mainstream consensus.
To those who might say that online is irrelevant, to "log-off" you are incorrect. See my argument below:
Where did a huge chunk of discussion and social interaction take place even before COVID? Online.
Where does even more take place since? Online.
Where might impressionable kids for whom the propaganda hasn’t set in encounter communist ideas? Unless you like picketing schools and handing out pamphlets the answer is online.
So yes. The left being silenced online has enormous ramifications for spreading our ideas and recruiting new people (young people spend so much of their social lives online). I myself can say my entire journey from liberal to ML occurred thanks to online interactions, communities and resources such as publications. Lots of other people were exposed entirely through personalities. Hell the largest left reddit sub ever, CTH ostensibly started out as a sub for a podcast. And most of you here I would bet were exposed to communist thought and became communists online.
It’s amusing then to say we should just spread ideas IRL and cede online. It smacks of fetishization of the way the revolutionaries of old did things without accounting for changes in a society.
Things have changed! Adapt to the new reality or lose. The public square in the modern age is online. The modern watercooler is online. There is nothing wrong with talking to people you know in real life and advocating in real life and you should, but you are foolish if you think online spreading of our ideas and countering lies is not an essential ingredient.
At any rate when you talk to people IRL what resources do you give them? I would bet money the resources are online, they're marxists.org, they're good youtubers, they're wikis that debunk NATO lies, etc. Without them you're left either telling people to buy books (lol, good luck, the fascists will "educate" you on fascism for free, no purchase or shipping needed) or if you have money handing out copies of hard to squire books and hoping people don't set them aside and lose them as they get absorbed into their computer after work. If propaganda online didn't matter then the capitalists, the empire, wouldn't spend so much money on manipulating opinion online.
There is also the matter of anti-imperialism. Even if we cannot get the masses to class consciousness via memes and posting we could previously undermine the lies that are used to justify imperialist aggression. We could present an alternative to the propaganda about China being used to manufacture a new cold war and racism. We could undermine the image of the US by spreading word of its atrocities which creates division and dissent which could result in enough pressure to save lives. Cracks in the armor of American exceptionalism are good. Look no further than the fact that on reddit these days our efforts have had dividends, in many China propaganda posts you can now find dissent upvoted, you can find skepticism of these notions upvoted.
Stay safe comrades. Things may be about to get much more dangerous and much harder.
I agree it's important, and I agree it's a bad position about to get worse, but what is the actual plan to do anything about it? Post about how twitter needs more free speech & should let nazis stay? what is that going to accomplish?