More censorship purges of left-wing pages and individuals

Facebook purges left-wing pages and individuals

On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred. .....

The attack on leading members of the SEP and other left-wing organizations is a calculated act of censorship, at the behest of the state and the ruling class, to silence opposition. These actions are part of a yearslong campaign to create the framework for censorship in the United States and internationally.

That’s all you get because you really need to read the whole thing. Around the time Alex Jones was banned from social media, Telumundo a Mexican television show had been censored off and on for months as well as other left leaning websites. This was right after Trump was elected IIRC so it’s been going on for a few years now, but once the capital event happened they took the gloves off.

And remember that Google changed its algorithms that decreased traffic to leftist websites by up to 90%. That is censorship.

In 2017, Google announced that it would promote “authoritative” news sources over “alternative viewpoints,” leading to a massive drop in search traffic to left-wing sites.

Good comment m

Why did it happen within days of Biden coming in? Capitalists with a more nuanced understanding and fear of the working class and situation? A war around the corner? Knowing that they couldn't get away with it during Trump because then the Biden supporters would be against it?

This is excellent too.

Beware Corporate ‘Democracy Washing’: Twitter, Trump, and the Danger of Privatizing the Fight Against Fascism

Twitter canceling Trump’s account shows that real political power in the United States shifted from government to corporations.

Beyond the immediate headlines is a more severe threat to democracy. That threat comes from granting social media and tech firms the power of political self-regulation. This escalating power is an

The history of appeasing fascism has never ended well for democracy. Neither has granting corporations the power to police themselves. To expect business corporations like Twitter and Facebook to transform into democratic saviors poses a profound and long-term danger to the actual survival of democracy.

THIS

That is not to say that hateful rhetoric should not be shut down. However, it does highlight the peril in allowing these tech firms to profit from that rhetoric politically. Remember, these are the same corporations that have been commercially benefiting from authoritarianism’s resurgence over the past decade.

Every leftist media outlet, the social media giants and lots of others made huge profits off of Trump for the last 5 years including them giving him $5 BILLION in free advertising during the republican primaries. And then every GD day after he became president. They fluffed him up and made everything seem to be worse than what it actually was. How many months did we hear that Trump would not concede the election? That he’d have to be dragged out of the White House? That he was going to declare martial law? And all the other things they did that propped him up and made them billions?

This is what censorship looks like. It’s what is happening right now and it’s going to get worse. Just saw a tweet saying that Google is threatening to pull out of Australia because of what they are demanding. Is Google bigger than some countries now? If so....

Google threatens to REMOVE search engine in Australia if legislators force it to share profits with news content creators

If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia.

I’m calling Biden YogiBiden because I’m having deja vu with Joe. He’s doing many of the same things that Obama did even though they failed then. If sending federal troops after peaceful protesters was bad then why isn’t it still bad that Biden had to have 25,000 armed federal troops to protect him and his friends? Why is it acceptable that DC is under martial law just because Biden is president? Hmm?

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thanatokephaloides's picture

My shot of schadenfreude with regard to the Trump Tweets has nothing to do with this. There was no possible exposure of mighty Facebook to civil liability for maintaining the SEP accounts, unlike the Trump Tweet situation where incitation to violence was a factor. There was no reason whatsoever for Facebook to have done this.

To all who are to the left of Ronald Reagan politically, I have this message, from "Patmos John's Bad Acid Trip":

"Come out of her, people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues!"

-- paraphrase of part of Christian Scriptures, Revelation 18:4 (KJV)

Theists who want a serious scare should read Rev. 18 with Facebook in mind. A Facebook account really has become everything Patmos John said about "the mark of the Beast" (Rev. 13:16-18)

Bad Bad Bad Bad Bad

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Those professors succinctly described the tech censorship by corporation problem, gave the perfect solution: make those forums public forums.
Those corporations answer to no one. They are well within their corporate rights to do what they are doing.
It is strange that lefties were not tech censored during the Trump term, but are being disappeared during Biden's.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp @on the cusp

their TDS and/or complacency about censorship and media and big tech bias and election interference was critical to to the success of the coup.

It is strange that lefties were not tech censored during the Trump term, but are being disappeared during Biden's.

Now that their usefulness in accomplishing that has mostly been concluded, well, think Night of the Long Knives. Need to keep the BLM/Antifa wilding going for awhile to give RINO's some cover voting for the next big police state upgrade, but after that (professional provocateurs excepted) they can expect to end up on the rough end of some cancellation themselves.

"First they came for Alex Jones, but I was not a paranoid right-wing conspiracy wacko trying to convince people of an elite plot to overthrow the republic and institute an authoritarian dystopian technocracy controlled by a tiny elite, so..."

Edit to add Tulsi G. - as usual, one of the few adults in the room:

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Lookout's picture

Julian is the bellwether. Truth will not be tolerated if it paints the US in a bad light (ie tells the truth about the empire).

I never did join spacebook nor twitter. Corporate power isn't about people, it is about profit and controlling the narrative.

Thanks for the links!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

usefewersyllables's picture

@Lookout

old saw writ large: "If you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product...".

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Twice bitten, permanently shy.

CS in AZ's picture

Thai woman jailed for record 43 years for criticising monarchy

A Thai woman has been jailed for 43 years for criticising the royal family, the country's harshest ever sentence for insulting the monarchy.

The former civil servant, known only as Anchan, posted audio clips from a podcast on social media.

The 63-year-old said she had simply shared the audio files and had not commented on the content.

Thailand's lèse-majesté law, which forbids any insult to the monarchy, is among the strictest in the world.

After a three-year break, Thailand revived the controversial law late last year in an attempt to curb months of anti-government protests, with demonstrators demanding changes to the monarchy.

Anchan pleaded guilty to 29 separate violations of sharing and posting clips on YouTube and Facebook between 2014 and 2015, her lawyer told the Reuters news agency.

She was initially sentenced to 87 years, but this was cut in half because of her guilty plea.

The trial was held behind closed doors and the evidence against the defendant kept secret for reasons of national security.

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snoopydawg's picture

@CS in AZ

because of this:

Thailand's lèse-majesté law, which forbids any insult to the monarchy, is among the strictest in the world.

We go to prison for breaking laws here too. Besides you know that isn't what I am talking about here. I am talking about corporations deciding what is valid speech and if they don't like it they can pull it. Well one day when it is without a doubt that we are living Orwell's nightmare maybe people will see that they overlooked the danger. I think we are there already. WaPoo rewrote a story on Kamala where she was laughing at a prisoner who asked her for water. Just removing the offending log from someone;s eye and things are good. It was like the room where the news was rewritten daily to keep up with the ever changing rules. Many other stories have been rewritten and then there is the Wikipedia creep who is changing many sites daily and turning them into fiction. People know what he is doing and call him out on it and yet he has been doing it for over 5 years. How many people know that they shouldn't trust Wikipedia for that reason?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Pluto's Republic's picture

...at the end of 2020, would shine on Communism, of all things. Nobody expected to see a potential utopia in the East like a shining beacon on the hill — a place where there was no poverty and everyone had a home they could afford, a way to earn money, and access to the most technologically advanced infrastructure on earth.

They certainly didn't expect Berne Sanders to deliver to the Left an idea whose time had come — a Socialist dream that would not die, no matter how many times Bernie was defeated, or how loudly these ideas were ridiculed.

The political Left brought an inconvenient perspective that always required crushing, as far back as early slavery. The perspective of the Left caused problems during the industrial revolution, and with their growing vision for world peace; the establishment of the League of Nations, and the rise of worker rights and the labor movements, and the push for unions and labor solidarity, not to mention the rise of women and the Equal Rights Amendment — ALL OF IT HAD TO BE CRUSHED. It had to be criminalized, vandalized, scandalized, and demonized. The LEFT was never tolerated in American Politics.

The Political Left was silenced by FDR's economic justice. It was vilified by the McCarthy hearings and demoralized during the Vietnam war. Over the next few decades, the populist bounty and oversight from the New Deal was systematically torn away from the People, and clawed back by the Overlords. But then, the Internet revealed the universal Political spectrum of all national governments — which spans from the Plutocratic Right to the Socialist Left. And there it was! The empty unfilled bench in US politics, where authentic Leftist principles finally had a designated place at the podium.

The Left was heard, but they were not clamoring for the Democratic Party and the statues que. They were the People — all the People together as the kind of Society that wants to build a civilization for themselves. The voice and consciousness of Society was heard, and it spoke about improving the lives of all the People. Not to incubate billionaires and corporate monopolies, and greedy politicians. But to further the development and joy of humanity. On the Internet, the Left had the moral compass and generated spiritual gravity, which drew in the like-minded and the emerging generations that will inherit all of it, just as we did.

So, once more, the Privileged Overlords must rise up and crush the Left. They believe if they silence the words that the Left speak — and the principles of decency and justice they stand for, they can somehow extinguish these ideas. What's upsetting them and spurring them on, is that the Left is urgently expressing the manifest truth of the times — and there is no force more powerful than that.

The Left need look no further than China to see one example of how the People's social dreams — no matter how utopian or grandiose — can be accomplished right on schedule by an accountable government of the People, by the People, and for the People. The Left knows what those words really mean and who our civilization really belongs to.

My guess.

[edit=typo]

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato