That, and other important stories like #GirtherGate and Congress's annual contrived government shutdown threat, have apparently filled the news-holes so densely that there was no room to cover the Wednesday Senate hearing in which groveling reps of the tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter outlined all the nifty ways they're censoring online content from users they've deemed undesirable or displeasing to the political establishment
The ostensible purpose of the hearing was "terrorism" and sex trafficking, but then it devolved quickly to generalized Content Moderation, which is postmodern Newspeak for censorship under that silly old First Amendment.
Social media's failure to crack down on what Senator John Thune (R-SD) called "extremist groups (that) recruit and radicalize folks that (sic) will commit violent acts against Americans" could well lead to fines and other punitive measures against the tech giants, he warned. He didn't bother to specify what exactly constitutes "extremist groups."
Eager to show how diligently they're cooperating with Congress and the US intelligence "community," Facebook Global Policy Director Monica Bickert bragged that her company now employs 7,500 people whose sole function is to monitor and remove allegedly dicey content. This censoring workforce, which includes alumni of spy agencies and law enforcement, will double by the end of year, she vowed.
Just as the 17-agency federal intelligence Borg is a form of bureaucratic overkill which misses more "terrorist plots" than it uncovers or manufactures, Facebook says it has now "partnered" with more than a dozen other private corporations to devise a permanent blacklist based upon certain digital fingerprints which only they, the patriotic nerds of America, can spot. Suspicion of subversion could therefore get a user banned from the entire Internet, with no hope of appeal or any other form of due process. Suspects shall be presumed guilty before they even know they're suspected of anything.
Google is taking it a step further by actively promoting content from "acceptable" news sources in an Orwellian initiative which it dubs Counter-Speech.
Clint Watts, a former FBI official who has glided through the revolving door to Censorship, Inc. added to the paranoia at the Wednesday Senate hearing as he described various far-fetched scenarios for the end of the world via the Internet. One of them is "Anwar Awlaki Meets PizzaGate." (Awlaki was the radical Muslim cleric who was droned to death on the extra-judicial orders of Barack Obama, while "PizzaGate" was the alt-right agitprop campaign which linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring run out of a D.C. pizza parlor, and which led to a true believer firing his weapon at the eatery's threatening ceiling.)
The danger, schmoozed Watts to the senators, is not so much the homegrown white supremacy resurgence, but the possibility that Russians are fooling the "lesser-educated" white American supremacists into wreaking havoc.
Twitter, for its own patriotic part, is so gung-ho about the assault on the First Amendment that it euphemistically calls its own censorship rep "the director of public policy and philanthropy."
As reported by Gizmodo,
Sen. Brian Schatz, for example, wanted to know if Twitter is taking care of its fake news problem and if we can be sure that it is “going to get this right, and before the midterms.” For the record, Twitter is more prepared this time around than it’s ever been, (Carlos) Monje said. And that’s not surprising because it’s never really had to think about the elections all that much until last year.Monje, despite being a nerd and a charity geek, must be one of those thoughtless dudes whom the FBI guy was complaining about. So it's good to know that the US Senate is such a great teacher. Twitter is not yet so patriotically savvy, however, that it has any immediate plans to ban Trump's own Twitter account and the reckless nuclear threats contained therein.
Meanwhile, the same US Senate which purports to be so worried about social media subversion today voted, by a grotesque two-to-one margin, to give the dangerous Donald "Fake News" Trump six more years of totally awesome and unfettered power to continue spying on anybody he feels like.
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In case you missed it, the World Socialist Website hosted a very interesting (and so far uncensored) discussion with Chris Hedges about censorship.
Although I can't prove it (lacking the necessary tools and expertise) I suspect that Sardonicky also has been censored. Google, which actually hosts me on its platform, had already discontinued the Google + feature, which effectively boosted search rankings according to the number of times a post was up-voted by readers. That absence did affect my traffic somewhat. But in just the last month, Google analytics informs me, my readership has plummeted by a drastic 60 percent. I assumed at first that people were too busy to drop by during the winter holidays. Then I wondered if it was a glitch on Google's end. Then I wondered if readers had simply grown bored, or had caught the nasty Flu bug, or got outrage-fatigued, or just plain sick of my contrarian "content." But to lose more than half your audience, all in the space of just four short weeks?
Then I decided not to take it seriously. Life is far too short to fret about blog traffic instead of worrying about the ongoing threat to pretty much the whole Bill of Rights.
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P.S., 1/19: I was alerted by "Clueless It Seems" in comments under my previous post that the commenting section of this post was gone. Sure enough, the cartoon I'd appended of Natasha the Spy had obliterated the commenting button. That'll teach me not to make graphic Russian jokes if I want to continue enjoying the privilege of using the Google blogging platform!
In case you're wondering why I don't just migrate to WordPress, I checked into it a long time ago. Because it would not allow me to transfer any of the art accompanying my posts, I decided against the move. Also, creating my own unique website would cost me money I don't have. So I'll continue muddling through at this free (at least in the monetary sense) venue for as long as I am able. Since I don't allow ads on this site, any cash they're making off me is probably minimal to none.
4 comments:
Back around 1940, I was old enough to hear Edward R. Murrow say, over scratchy shortwave radio from London, "The lights are going out all over Europe." He was lucky enough to be broadcast by big radio reaching millions. Murrow's deep voice and polished reports commanded the attention of the grownups around me. The darkness that followed in the middle of the 20th century was indeed awful, at least "over there."
Compared to what Europeans (and Asians) went through, we in North America had it easy. Sure, a few gold stars were hung in windows up and down my street, a gas station on Broad Street suddenly closed "for the duration," and my mom had trouble finding meat in the market on Dexter Street. I remember her once slipping a bill to the butcher, then damning him all the way home.
Something similar is underway now. Lights we depend on are going out all over the world. This time around, the MSM is deeply dishonest and superb at superficiality. Writers like Hedges, Garcia and Street are being muffled. CBS is not there to broadcast them. Forget the once great dailies. Now the internet, honest journalism's last redoubt, is being undermined by its own managers. "Do No Evil" Google is going back on its old motto. The message of thinking writers is too purist, and their passion is so uncool.
Fuck the handwriting on the wall. We have lots of gasoline and an all volunteer army to do the dirty work, dirty work that gets reported far from the front page, if at all. Your work and your pleasure are always with you on a small device that fits in your pocket. Unparalleled freedom is under our thumb all day. And who walks home from the grocery store anymore? See, our leaders have not only preserved "our way of life," they have improved it––at least for that 50% of the population smart enough to locate their own bootstraps when needed.
But the systematic snuffing out of honest talk, even in side streets of the internet, is adding to the growing darkness. As for you little people reading that stuff, better move along to approved sites, because names are being taken. Embrace ignorance. While it lasts, enjoy your endless morning in America.
Every day in every way we're getting to be more like everything we claimed the old USSR was. Controlled elections and media. Militarism and foreign aggression. Decaying infrastructure, housing, and manufacturing. Shoddy consumer goods. Ever tighter restrictions on both speech and movement. And we've been edging closer to requiring internal passports for a while now.
Related to censorship is the broader topic of secrecy. I've been reading Ellsberg's new book "The Doomsday Machine" and it reminds me of the pervasiveness of government secrecy across administrations and political eras since WW2. I don't think Ellsberg mentions Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but the story Ellsberg tells is reinforcing of what Moynihan wrote about in a little-noticed book called "Secrecy" published in 1998 -- that secrecy hurts the governments own internal missions and efforts.
BTW, my most positive take-away from this book is that I have a new perspective on global warming, such as the goal to limit warming to 3.6F by 2100. We will blow up the planet before we ever get that far!! (smile)
What's the word for instilling fear and/or having a chilling effect in order to get people to censor themselves? Twitterers have started getting the following message from Twitter that does that:
"As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by Russian-government linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.
We are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is PURELY for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account."
So we know they keep tabs on what we like, share, follow, retweet, whatever, but it's 'PURELY' for our own 'information purposes'. I love that word 'PURELY'. It's a red flag word if I ever saw one and you'll see it again. They're clearly keeping closer tabs on us than on Russia.
I recently ran across this old Reuters article from 6 years ago which makes me believe even more that the whole Russia thing is a hoax and pretext for more Deep State censorship and control:
'Homeland Security Watches Twitter and Social Media':
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
A 'privacy compliance review' issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a 'Social Networking/Media Capability' which involves regular monitoring of 'publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.'
The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to 'collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.'
A DHS official familiar with the monitoring program said that it was intended PURELY to enable command center officials to keep in touch with various Internet-era media so that they were aware of major, developing events to which the Department or its agencies might have to respond."
Not very aware of 'Russia', were they? Or maybe there was no there there until they made it all up as a pretext to crack down on domestic dissent on social media. PropOrNot was obviously their doing too. How sweet of them to state that the monitoring program was 'purely' to 'keep in touch' with various social media *kiss*kiss*. Talk about pure bullshit.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelandsecurity-websites/homeland-security-watches-twitter-social-media-idUSTRE80A1RC20120111
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