The Slippery Slope of Censorship

Hey Facebook and Twitter: What? The? Actual? Fuck?

This is a scary development. Perhaps it's not quite as scary as the revelations in the disappearance and possible murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi royal family, but in some ways scarier considering the number people who have suddenly lost sources of information outside the mainstream.

Today 800 pages were purged from Facebook. All dissident thought. @AntiMedia’s Twitter account was suspended as well soon after. Then @Freethoughtproject was suspended on Twitter soon after. FB and Twitter are working together to crush all anti-establishment voices.

— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@LeeCamp) October 12, 2018

Facebook, Twitter Purge More Dissident Media Pages In Latest Escalation

"As if that wasn’t creepy enough, some of the accounts purged by Facebook appear to be getting censored on Twitter as well"#Facebook #Twitter #censorshiphttps://t.co/wNQ66trKVp

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 12, 2018

look at the pages that just got totally deleted by FaceBook! and this is just some of them, do you see a correlation here? pic.twitter.com/GhW3bhvpVd

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 11, 2018

Without warning or explanation, #Facebook just unpublished hundreds of pages including independent media outlets with millions of followers. Make no mistake, this is an extreme act of censoring the truth. #censorship pic.twitter.com/J54bPcmgBA

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) October 12, 2018

I don't have a lot to say about it at this time, except that we need to be vigilant and obstreperous in responding to corporate-state censorship of alternative media sources and ideas, whichever quadrant of the political map they call home. You know that chart (and subsequent variations) that your liberal friends have been circulating on Facebook for the past two years, depicting the relative objectivity and accuracy of various information sources? The latest round of censorship has the feel of trying to confine all information into the circles and ellipses in the middle portion, claiming the right to decide which are trash and which are treasure (or at least worthwhile).

The viral chart supposedly depicting the relative partisan bias and reliability of various news sources.

For numerous reasons I won't explore here, the chart and its variants are, themselves, trash. The primary reason, however, is that the entities in the the "mainstream" and "skews" columns are loaded with pro-establishment propaganda. They made not be made entirely thereof, but they spew plenty of it, both in the form of repeating military-industrial-governmental viewpoints without a counterpoint and of "analysis" from their own hired opinionators.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than what the NYT and WaPo deem worthy of printing.