Governments Going Crazy With Unlawful Censorship
Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control
Tom Luongo
Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no apparent reason.
The latest outrage is Twitter banning the account of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange’s mother, Christine.
Australian and New Zealand ISPs have gone bonkers IP blocking sites in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Sites like Zerohedge have been targeted in the past two weeks for publishing narratives orthogonal to what the governments in the West are comfortable with people consuming.
First it was Facebook, blocking and then unblocking Zerohedge with no apparent reasoning behind it. Now its ISP’s over-reacting to an emotional event ensuring that a good crisis never goes to waste.
And these ISPs are going much farther than just avoiding any potential legal liabilities. They are now openly calling for the platforms themselves — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — be regulated by governments to stop ‘dangerous information’ from reaching the eyeballs of consumers.
And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians underneath.
It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free. These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.
So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a large swath of people.
Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…?
It’s especially easy to do this after having whipped everyone up into two camps of highly polarized and radicalized camps across multiple political vectors.
Trump vs. Liberals in the U.S.
Remainers vs. Leavers in the U.K.
Open borders vs. Immigration control across the West
Global warming alarmists vs. skeptics in Europe
Gun Control vs. American Deplorables.
I could go on and on.
All of these false dualities, false divides are meant to drive us into two camps and act as a barrier to communication. As a sh&tlib are you more or less willing to suffer an argument for free speech if it comes from a Deplorable?
We all know the answer to that question.
And vice versa is also equally true. Deplorables don’t want to deal with Trump’s shortcomings as President because it’s a betrayal of MAGA.
Make no mistake, this polarization of electorates all around the world was planned. It’s part and parcel of the divide and conquer strategy which preps the rhetorical ground preceding color revolutions.
If it begins with de-platforming Alex Jones, it ends with what we’re seeing today. Now it’s no longer banning Alex Jones because he supposedly harassed families of Sandy Hook victims. Now it’s jailing people for sharing the video of the Christchurch madman’s self-aggrandizement video.
Catching up Zerohedge in this censorship net makes it obvious that this was a plan of action waiting for a catalyst to set in motion. Since Zerohedge never once hosted the Christchurch video.
Less than a week after Facebook ‘mistakenly’ banned us for two days with no explanation following several reports which were critical of the social media giant, we learned that Zero Hedge has now been banned in New Zealand and Australia, despite the fact that we never hosted video footage of the Christchurch attack. We were not contacted prior to the censorship. Instead, we have received a steady flood of people noting that the site is unavailable in the two countries unless a VPN is used.
Simply put this is the next escalation in the censorship war against the alternative press and citizen journalism.
For the Children!
The steady stream of drivel from lawmakers around the world about social media regulation is in the name of protecting the people.
Now the ISPs and the platforms want to get together and police the content, giving it the veneer of private party self-control, rather than heavy-handed government censorship.
That’s nonsense. All of these companies owe their existence either to direct government investment or support through government-granted franchise monopolies and other market distortions which built barriers to entry for competition.
So this is not, as the totalitarian anti-free-speech Left would tell us, an expression of their right to or not to host content they disagree with. It is purely about assuming and exerting control over what we are allowed to think.
It’s simply censorship by proxy, the hallmark of an end-state corporatist oligopoly.
But it’s never about protecting the people. It’s about protecting governments from the people finding out the inconvenient truth that they aren’t in control of anything anymore.
And they are scared to death of us using these communications tools debunking their lies, omissions and agendas in real time.
Without them there is no Brexit. There is no Trump. There is no Salvini, Orban or Putin, frankly.
Remember, they may think they are the smartest people in the room, but they are not smarter than the people collectively in the room itself. And they know this.
So it’s now time to shrink the room. Remove the people from the room (Internet itself) so that the information cannot be worked over by the collective wisdom of millions.
Do You Think You’re Being Treated Unfairly?
On every issue I listed above government’s are losing the argument. People know why this push for censorship is happening. People like George Soros and Tom Steyer have been building this plan to concentrate traffic onto a limited number of bandwidth providers (net neutrality) and mobile platform providers (Google, Apple) for over a decade.
And once the success of sites like Patreon and other crowd-funding mechanisms began to siphon off the need to enslave content creators to advertising revenue, they had to be brought into this as well.
The net result is the swift un-personing of someone who speaks a little too much truth to power to a few too many people. The sad truth is that this is only the beginning of the censorship.
The good news is that people are too clever by half. And the censorship of today quickly turns into the new opportunities for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to the day of blockchain-based, peer-to-peer networking information sharing. 5G could easily being that to life in a way that changes how we communicate in a mass sense in real time.
Because this push for massive censorship is proof positive that we are winning. If they weren’t scared of their planned future being in jeopardy they wouldn’t be ripping off the masks now.
IP blocking is the easiest thing to get around.
A free VPN built into a browser, like Opera’s, gets around this. It hasn’t stopped The Pirate Bay. It won’t stop Zerohedge. Until, of course, Apple and Google pull all the VPN apps from their App Stores due to government regulations.
And that will be the next phase of the censorship.
If our faith in our governments wasn’t failing we wouldn’t be watching the drama over Brexit. Brexit would have been betrayed back in December. But the politicians are scared of the consequences now.
And they are desperate to shift the blame for getting what they want, remaining in the EU, to the other party.
The same thing is happening in Europe. Euroskeptics are rising. The rejection of globalism is everywhere. Their Internet regulations (Article 11 and 13) are, like net neutrality, solutions in search of problems. And their goal is to stifle speech critical of their activity.
But it is simply a desperate attempt to finish a project that has not a prayer of surviving. And we have to remain not only vigilant but nimble to stay on the air.
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https://tomluongo.me/2019/03/20/censorship-government-control-christchurch/