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https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-censorship-mania-threat-progressive-media/5735240

U.S. Censorship Mania: A Threat to Independent Media. The Secretive Plan to Shut Down the Internet

A censorship mania going far beyond the necessary social media banning of Trump’s fascist coup incitement is appearing in U.S. Democratic party leadership circles leading to the necessity to warn of the possibility that socialist and progressive social media presence and websites may be heavily censored or banned, and to urge that as a precaution multiple versions of progressive websites or at least of their databases should be located in multiple countries.

Congressional Representatives Anna Eshoo and Tom Malinowski have now written letters demanding that the CEO’s of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (which is owned by Google) censor content which reinforces “existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear.” They have also refereed to uncensored social media as allowing the ‘pollution of Americans minds’.

Note that ‘existing political biases’ and “those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear” and the notion that we must not permit the ‘polluting of Americans minds’ is a ‘blankcheck’ formula allowing any political website to be targeted and censored.”

Even more sinister is the fact that the right-wing website Parler was targeted for removal and denied online space by Amazon cloud and shut-down.

I believe it would be a serious political mistake not to to prepare for the possibility of censorship or shutdown of independent and progressive online systems. The Democratic party shares one thing with Trump: a fear of socialism. The U.S. political elites who feel no compunction in ordering wars of aggression that slaughter hundreds of thousands in other countries are quite capable of trampling over the right of free speech and press.

The Secretive Plan to Shut Down the Internet

The U.S. state has, in fact, already a secretive plan in place to shut down the internet and mobile phone systems, or portions thereof. This plan, known as SOP 303, enables the shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during a self-defined ‘national crisis’.

In 2016 the U.S. Supreme court declined to hear a petition from the Electronic Privacy information center which would have required release of the SOP 303 details

What is known is that the plan gives officials of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the internet with no consultation or input from either the U.S. Congress or the public. Determining what constitutes an ’emergency’ is left solely up to the Homeland officials. China, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria are just some of the countries where all or a local or regional portion of the internet have been previously shut down due to a supposed, emergency’, which was usually mass protests against government policies or social conditions.

Serious resistance by American workers to the ever-growing wars of aggression and deterioration of their living and working conditions has long been an inevitable.development. Amid the current depression-level economic conditions and other dislocations of life in the U.S., SOP 303 may well be implemented to shut down vital communication by workers – the vast majority of American people – as legitimate resistance grows ever stronger.

Implementation of the SOP 303 plan would not be technically difficult. It’s true that no individual organization or government agency directly controls the entire internet. But the major social media platforms – including Facebook, Youtube, and Google – as well as mobile phone networks such as Verizon, are already closely integrated with the U.S. state.

They have collaborated in the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) program of mass surveillance of online emails, social media, and phone calls by the American people and internationally They are also part of the new U.S. government program to have the online media giants censor the internet by downgrading or blocking access to socialist, ant-war, and progressive websites and systems – such as Counterpunch or World Socialist Website on the spurious grounds of blocking ‘fake news.

Google, to cite just one instance,, recently established a censorship algorithm and censorship staff group. Google censorship now effectively blocks access to at least 20 progressive websites. It does so by ensuring that users searching for information will not find those progressive sites because their links are placed very far down the search result on a second, third, or even fifth search page. Progressive sites have thereby lost 30, 40, even75% of their previous important traffic flow from Google.

It would therefore not take much for Homeland Security officials to end most online or phone communication. A few phone calls ordering the giant social media platforms and Google to shut down; a few more calls to the giant phone companies; and an order, enforced if necessary by police, for all or selected ISP’s (internet service providers) to shut down the websites they host, is all it would take to end most online or phone communication.

It should also be emphasized that the major social media systems, and mobile phone apps such as What’s app and Line, serve a large part of the world’s population. Facebook, for example, has two billion registered users from across the planet. It recently setup a censorship group of five hundred Facebook employees in Germany to monitor its content for information not to the liking of the German government.

To defend the basic democratic right of free communication, American and international workers -including IT workers – must organize to end all government surveillance, censorship, and use of the internet by governments to control the people of America and the world.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/26/twitter-rolls-out-new-wikipedia-like-program-to-narrative-manage-tweets/

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

Twitter has announced that it will be employing “a new community-driven approach to help address misleading information” called Birdwatch which news media are comparing to the model of content moderation used by Wikipedia.

“Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets,” reports NBC. “The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis.”

“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Twitter’s official statement says. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

Such claims provide little reassurance for anyone who’s familiar with the establishment narrative control operations which take place on Wikipedia in exactly that way. The Grayzone‘s Ben Norton did a great two-part report last year on the way concerted, aggressive efforts by a small group of shady-looking Wikipedia editors has succeeded in dominating the site’s articles which relate to western imperialist agendas and the reporters who support and oppose those agendas, including getting outlets like WikiLeaks and The Grayzone banned from use as sources despite their having no history of false reports.

“The internet encyclopedia has become a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces,” wrote Norton. “And it is run by figures who often represent these same elite interests, or align with their regime-change politics.”

Since 2018 alternative media voices like The Canary and Media Lens have been reporting on the frenetic editing behavior of a Wikipedia account by the name of “Philip Cross” which works an inhuman number of hours without ever taking a day off, largely targeting the accounts of those who criticize the western empire and voice skepticism of its dominant narratives.

This kind of aggressive narrative management campaign is why when you look at any Wikipedia article about an internationally disputed issue on the world stage, say for example the article about the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, you’ll see the word “Bellingcat” no fewer than 20 times as of this writing and a heavy bias toward the western narrative that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack, but won’t find information about the gaping plot holes in the story like the ones documented in this excellent article by The Nation‘s Aaron Maté, nor will you see any links back to this article.

So it’s already established that this sort of “community-driven approach” to information control can easily be exploited by well-funded groups which have a vested interest in doing so. The fact that Twitter has already been functioning as a propaganda arm of the US government with regard to its willingness to deplatform accounts from imperialism-targeted nations like Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China means we can only expect this bias to go one way with regard to imperialist narrative management.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1353766523664531459

The fact that this “Birdwatch” program will most likely be used to determine the dominant narrative on disputed events like potential false flags and what’s happening in nations like China and Syria means it’s obnoxious that Twitter’s post promoting it features an imaginary account saying “Whales are not real! They’re robots funded by the government to watch us!!” As though that sort of indisputable falsehood is the sort of post this program will actually be targeting rather than people expressing doubts about things like Russian hackers and the White Helmets.

Twitter chose to use “whales aren’t real” as its example of the “misinformation” its new program will be “fighting” not because it is cute and funny, but because using any of the actual narratives it will wind up manipulating would have set off people’s alarm bells. Imagine the reaction if they’d chosen something like Covid vaccinations for example, even though this could very well end up being one of the issues Birdwatch winds up exercising narrative control over.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. That’s all you’re ever seeing in all the efforts to manage information via censorship, algorithm changes, “fact” checking, Russian propaganda panic, etc. Humans are story-driven animals, so if you control the stories you control the humans.

The US-centralized oligarchic empire will be doing a lot of evil things in the near future, and it will be necessary to control the narrative about those things. That’s all we’re really looking at here.