Please Save Us From "Disinformation"!!!

 

The brilliant Caitlin Johnstone eloquently condemns the tendency towards mass censorship on giant online media platforms:

The problem came in when the corporations which were elevated to the top of this new paradigm began collaborating more and more brazenly with ruling power structures, to the point where they’re now just openly working with US government agencies to determine what information to censor. They have every incentive to do this as talk of antitrust cases and reinterpreting Section 230 heats up; they know the odds of their monopolies being torn apart go down the more favorable they make themselves to the government powers that would enforce them.

This is a major, major problem for humanity as a species, because we will never be able to make real changes to the systemic problems which are driving us toward disaster as long as establishment power is controlling our ability to interact with each other.

https://twitter.com/richimedhurst/status/1316920876680564737

Establishment power will keep advancing its own interests at all cost, even if it means pushing us into nuclear war or climate collapse. The only way to end their destructive rule is for a critical mass of the public to rise up and use the power of their numbers to force real change. People will not rise up and use the power of their numbers to force real change as long as they are being successfully propagandized not to by the ruling power establishment. People will continue to be successfully propagandized as long as a critical mass are prevented from viewing ideas and information which contradict establishment-friendly narratives.

Lately, racist authoritarian anti-democratic thug Joe Biden's crackhead, corrupt, man-child Hunter dropped off his laptop at a repair shop and then forgot about it. Along with home-made porn, there were also incriminating emails on it. The repair-shop guy turns out to be a Trump fan (and therefore a complete shit-head) and he copies the files and gives them to Rudy Giuliani who gives them to the New York Post. Democrats and other foolish people are screaming that this is all a Russia psy-ops campaign. Rather than an abandoned laptop, Giuliani got the files (the veracity of which the Democrats/Biden/Hunter haven't challenged) from VLADIMIR PUTIN!!! And therefore, reporting on them makes you a "Kremlin idiot." And therefore "Twitter" prevented people from re-tweeting the NYPost link.

For some reason, the last time I was at working on this post I started talking about "hate speech." I don't know why but I'm going to leave it here:

Personally I have always had a problem with criminalizing "hate speech." Leftists (and other anti-racists) have said that it is foolish to defend the rights of racists because they won't defend your rights and freedoms and neither will the authorities. But I respond to that by saying that willfully allowing one of your own rights to be disregarded by the state is self-defeating. Furthermore, "anti-Hate" laws have been used against us. When a rapper makes a song about wanting to kill cops (for their murderous institutional racism) and he's threatened with violating hate-speech laws. Women of colour condemning cases of patriarchal racists are threatened with propagating "hatred" of white males. 

Anyhoo, the right-wing conspiracy community "Q-Anon" has also been de-platformed. Again, to save us from "dis-information." Because it's this "dis-information" that is dividing US-Americans like never before. 

Sigh. This is part of a long process of trying to marginalize alternative voices and artificially inflate the (already vast) reach of approved media. Remember the moronic, oligarchic mind-control initiative "Prop or Not?" When anyone who didn't see the world the same way as the Democratic Leadership Council was a "useful idiot" for the Kremlin?

One of the core functions of PropOrNot appears to be its compilation of a lengthy blacklist of news and political websites that it smears as peddlers of “Russian propaganda.” Included on this blacklist of supposed propaganda outlets are prominent independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout, Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News, and Truthdig.

Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks. Far-right, virulently anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces. Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty. On its Twitter account, the group announced a new “plugin” that automatically alerts the user that a visited website has been designated by the group to be a Russian propaganda outlet.

We are not more divided than we've ever been. Many of us are angry because the system has failed us. Not because social media has manipulated our emotions. Which article have I already read? This one? Or this one? Here's a quote from the first one:

The Social Dilemma is right to highlight the power that is at stake here. And when it draws attention, with palpable horror, to the exponential growth in computer processing power, it clearly apprehends that processing power is political power. However, it’s extraordinary that it doesn’t occur to anyone to think of it as class power. For what is being automated most efficiently in the cybernetic offensive on living labor are the imperatives of capital.

The absence of capital from the film’s imagination results in some very strange and telling formulations. We are told that AI runs the world. That “as humans, we’ve almost lost control over these systems.” That a “checkmate on humanity” is afoot. That the machines are “overpowering human nature,” whose operating systems and processing power evolves much more slowly. The only sense in which any of this is true is the sense in which AI is just the programmatic expression of capital.

And here's one from the second one.

Yet this techno-deterministic narrative vastly inflates the capabilities of data capture and algorithms, and, in so doing, blames a whole range of problems on technology that have their root in more fundamental social and economic conditions of modern society. It is important to understand what effects these technologies are having on us, both personally and collectively, but failing to recognize the longer history of these problems and the broader structures that contribute to them will lead us to solutions that don’t actually get to the root causes.

...

What all of this tells us is that reducing growing social problems to new technologies is simply not accurate. Framing the problem in that way makes it seem as though if we create better platforms, our problems will be solved — but if the platforms are responding to the economic incentives of the capitalist system, maybe that should get more scrutiny.

Are we to believe that social polarization is the product of Facebook, and not the fact that income inequality has returned to pre–Great Depression levels (and is likely much worse due to the pandemic)?

Are we to believe that a distrust of elites and politicians is the result of Google’s search results, and not the fact that the political system is unresponsive to the needs of the vast majority of the population, while the government lets industry regulate itself, leading to tragedies like the Boeing 737 MAX?

Fine. T'was the second one that I'd read. Anyhow, the point is that falling for this elite agenda of censorship is going to GET US all KILLED.