This article starts off by chewing out Fakebook for its opportunistic business practices and its resident RUSSIAN! bots, it then makes a big detour into the Ukraine and the dirty tactics of afore mentioned RUSSIANS! during the coup (irony alert), starts singing the praises of Robert Mueller for wising us all up to the fact that we're all dupes of afore-afore mentioned RUSSIANS!, and provides examples of their fake stories about Muslims, rape, and the French ‘gay lobby’. And to add to the the outrage, Hungarians and other bad rabbits are involved also too. (Yeah, I’m still trying to figure all that out.) But I do believe that I get the point of what this woman is carrying on about, and that is Censorship. With a capital ‘C’. We need to be protected from thinking for ourselves. Because we’re stupid.

It’s not just Russia anymore

(SKIP TO MIDDLE OF ARTICLE)

Fox News and the Trump-friendly media operate in exactly the same way. As I’ve written in the past, Donald Trump openly used Russian slogans and narratives during his 2016 election campaign.

At the moment, though, he doesn’t need to borrow from them anymore. A recent New York Times analysis of how the president came to be obsessed with the “caravan of illegal aliens” listed the ways the original story came to be ­enhanced and misreported, deliberately, by what we would in another country call pro-regime media. As retold on “Fox & Friends,” or hyped by Frontpage Mag, “Beltway pundit,” and thousands of bots and trolls (both voluntary and professional), the story lost some critical ­details: that many of the group were refugees from Honduras’s drug wars, or that many planned to stay in Mexico, or that others hope to cross the U.S. border legally to apply for asylum. By the time the tale of the caravan reached the president’s Twitter feed — which has featured faked or mislabeled video in the past, as well — it was an “invasion” requiring the presence of the National Guard.

I repeat: These are Russian tactics. But they are being used by a U.S. president, a Hungarian government and others who are not in power, or not yet. That’s why solutions to disinformation campaigns that focus on Russia alone are insufficient.

Here’s the real challenge faced by all the major platforms: how to re-engineer them to make them more resistant to organizations that, like the Internet ­Research Agency, engage in what one tech executive calls “coordinated inauthentic activity,” ranging from the use of false names and the creation of false audiences to the publication of false stories and the creation of divisive ­narratives. Perhaps they will have to limit the use of anonymity, change the algorithms that ensure that the most sensational material spreads the fastest, or institute transparency around video editing tools, especially as these become more sophisticated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/the-disinformation-tacti...

There seems to be a movement to start censoring the ‘information’ that we are allowed to access on the internet and elsewhere and it seems to me the biggest push for it is coming from the ‘left’. It makes me upset having to rely on the ‘right’ to protect us from these anti-Constitutional justifications being used to justify control of free speech and access to information. It’s particularly galling because its genisis is rooted in a desperate need for certain political miscreants on said ‘left’ to maintain the facade that they aren’t responsible for one of this country’s worst political scandals. Support for Wall Street over the people, drone killings, eternal war, NSA spying, and blind obedience to the whims and the will of the MIC are all policies that should be anathema to the ‘left, but have now become SNAFU. Now add to all that the concept that we’re supposed to let them control what information we are to be allowed to access. Is it my imagination or is the ‘left’ starting to sound a lot like those dastardly RUSSIANS! they keep ranting and raving about? I wonder about other things too, like why is it so many don’t see how wrong and dangerous this situation is? And why are so many allowing TPTB to get away with taking us back to the freaking feudal system with their aid and acquiescence?

The so-called ‘left’ in this country is pretty much comparable to a herd (or whatever) of lemmings headed for a day at the beach.

EDIT TO ADD: it is really disgusting that the author of this article would stoop so low as to use this humanitarian crisis as an excuse to promote this bullshit push for censorship in America.