Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ The elephant in the room with the ongoing controversy about the Biden administration's push for more internet censorship is the fact that both the US government and the Silicon Valley tech companies who are being pushed to censor are acutely aware that those companies can be brought to their knees by antitrust cases and other regulation if they don't censor people's voices in accordance with the government's wishes.
"So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms" -- which is exactly why I dumped FB and never got on Twitter. As a molecular biologist, I posted a Medium article about the failure of Pharma to release the vaccine molecular biology data (despite the use of public money). Questioning whether the mRNA vaccines were as immunologically efficacious as they could be, my arguments about so-called mucosal immunity were based on solid immunological principles, which I taught at a postgrad level for 20 years. In retrospect, had I posted on major social media, I'd likely have been censored by some technocrat a-hole with a near-zero knowledge of molecular immunology. Just an observation of how bloody absurd this is/can be.
I don't think it is antitrust cases that the companies fear, but rather an immediate loss of income from subsidized advertisements and other government financial benefits.
Facebook has been running nonsense ads since before the 2020 election. Somebody was paying for those ads, and the DNC won the election, so my guess is it was the DNC .
Nowadays I see pop up ads for Facebook on Youtube. Why would Facebook pay Google to display pop up ads that say "join Facebook, connect with your friends" ? My guess here is that the pop up ads are secretly subsidized through the universal service fee.
Wow, Caitlin. Your powerful statement that, "It's always easier to move with power than against it." says it all! I've seen this in all sectors of society from the top down, especially now within the sub-sectors of Public Health. Any one with any sense can see that "Public Health" is not about health at all. Rather, they are all aligning with establishment interests, like an army of tin soldiers, lined up to do the bidding of their masters, for the win. All of them selling their souls for the dollar.
“ People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship.”
Johnstone, Greenwald, Taibi, and many other writers on the far-left or alt-right are ranting that Biden's fascist government is bullying internet corporations to censor misinformation about COVID-19 as millions die across the globe. The Stasi do that; not America. They demand the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom. That strikes me as a very lethal two-edged sword they are swinging.
"So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms" -- which is exactly why I dumped FB and never got on Twitter. As a molecular biologist, I posted a Medium article about the failure of Pharma to release the vaccine molecular biology data (despite the use of public money). Questioning whether the mRNA vaccines were as immunologically efficacious as they could be, my arguments about so-called mucosal immunity were based on solid immunological principles, which I taught at a postgrad level for 20 years. In retrospect, had I posted on major social media, I'd likely have been censored by some technocrat a-hole with a near-zero knowledge of molecular immunology. Just an observation of how bloody absurd this is/can be.
I don't think it is antitrust cases that the companies fear, but rather an immediate loss of income from subsidized advertisements and other government financial benefits.
Facebook has been running nonsense ads since before the 2020 election. Somebody was paying for those ads, and the DNC won the election, so my guess is it was the DNC .
Nowadays I see pop up ads for Facebook on Youtube. Why would Facebook pay Google to display pop up ads that say "join Facebook, connect with your friends" ? My guess here is that the pop up ads are secretly subsidized through the universal service fee.
Wow, Caitlin. Your powerful statement that, "It's always easier to move with power than against it." says it all! I've seen this in all sectors of society from the top down, especially now within the sub-sectors of Public Health. Any one with any sense can see that "Public Health" is not about health at all. Rather, they are all aligning with establishment interests, like an army of tin soldiers, lined up to do the bidding of their masters, for the win. All of them selling their souls for the dollar.
“ People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea
I love you.
All just logical ramifications of the war against free speech and journalism, cf. the show trial of Julian Assange.
Johnstone, Greenwald, Taibi, and many other writers on the far-left or alt-right are ranting that Biden's fascist government is bullying internet corporations to censor misinformation about COVID-19 as millions die across the globe. The Stasi do that; not America. They demand the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom. That strikes me as a very lethal two-edged sword they are swinging.