SC271-6

https://brownstone.org/articles/facebook-is-dead/

Facebook Is Dead Unless You Post Something that Does Not Matter

Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, it’s been quite a wild ride. Thousands of doctors and scientists have been unbanned and are now speaking. Same with journalists. Accounts that posted against Covid restrictions and mandates are now unthrottled. Brownstone’s account is now at 31K and my own personal reach is up some 175 percent. 

Of course, this is also infuriating. When we needed these voices the most was during the biggest attacks on liberty in our lifetime. Now that the powers that be have been forced by public opinion to dial back their oppressions, these voices can speak again. It’s good that the truth is getting out there but imagine the kind of difference it would have made for these 33 months if there had been no blocks on information from the start? 

It’s a creepy feeling to know based on disclosures so far that I was certainly throttled. It did not matter what I posted, it got no traction. The censors – meaning certainly the government – learned over time that there might be too much provocation associated with outright bans. Turning down the dial on reach was a better way. 

Of course during this entire period, the same platform also invited you to pay for reach. Throw them a few bucks and they will give you some eyeballs. When the money runs out, you are back to where you were. You couldn’t prove the throttling. You just sensed it in your bones but when you complained about it, people would throw it back at you: you just fail to admit that your content is unworthy! 

In any case, now we know. There were FBI agents embedded all over the platform. The White House and various deep-state actors were pushing Twitter to censor. After a while, it became the main job of the platform to block reach rather than actually doing what they are supposed to do. 

Twitter is quasi-free now but what about the rest?

For years, my Facebook account has been irrelevant to me. I don’t even know why I bother using it at all. We know for sure that Facebook has been subject to the same controls that once affected Twitter. Same goes for LinkedIn and Google, of course. No doubt about that. My typical post sits there with almost no reach at all.

What I’ve not known is whether I’m targeted directly or my account has long been restricted by virtue of keywords and content. As everyone knows, I shifted my life 3 years ago to post entirely about the invasions of life, liberty, and property that commenced in 2020.

I did this not because I wanted to abandon other research projects but rather because Covid became a window into the nefarious works of the ruling class I had long opposed. Plus few others seemed willing to speak out. Most of my own ideological set was predisposed to “leave this subject to the experts” and thus went silent. I went the other direction.

That decision killed my reach on Facebook. There was nothing I could do about it so I decided just to forget it. But this morning, a friend had a great idea. He suggested that I post a cute animal picture with no other comment other than to say it is a test. I did this very thing and posted the following picture. 

The results: an explosion of reach! Out of nowhere it was like the old Facebook, with comments and conversations and shares, plus many hundreds of likes. Absolutely amazing! At least for me, this test suggests something important. Zuckerberg is surely flagging accounts but the main means of control is content. Say something that means something and your post disappears from feeds. Post something stupid and irrelevant and you can have all the views you want. 

Of course Facebook’s business is selling your content in order to sell ads. That’s it, nothing more. But as a tool of state control of the public mind plus surveillance, it is extremely useful to state actors. And in the last three years, it has served this purpose very well. The platform is not dead, contrary to what seemed true, but rather directed toward a particular purpose. It’s not just selling ads. It’s selling an anodyne impression of a neutered public mind. 

To be sure, if some website offered a deal to users – you post pics of lunch, cats, and flowers, and we give you ads – and it worked, fine. That’s normal terms of use. That’s not what is going on. Via explicit and implicit pressure, combined with irresponsible management, Facebook turned over its entire business model to government to deploy on behalf of regime interests. The customers and stockholders were the victims. 

What applies here is also true for YouTube, Instagram, and all the rest of the mainstream platforms, which constitute the vast swath of social media content in existence. I like the alternative platforms but they are small players by comparison. The freedom and reach we get today on Twitter is beautiful but how long can it last? Is this a brief window that is opened before it shuts again?

Nothing has changed on the rest of them, which means that nothing has changed with regard to the state-directed censorship that took over our lives three years ago. That’s a terrifying reality, and especially so for intellectuals and writers who imagined some years ago that these tools would be a gift for making a difference in the world. 

I’m inclined to think that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter is a fluke – a lucky one to be sure but the strange exception. He should watch his back. The main drive to control the conversation and shape the public mind is still with us: bad actors working to limit criticism of themselves and their policies. It is just as intense now as it was at the height of the lockdowns and drive for universal vaccination. 

We’ve never needed the First Amendment more than we do now. And just when it became most necessary, it failed. We should all hope for victory in the lawsuits going on against the government but what does victory mean? Who or what is going to make sure this does not happen again? We still don’t have a clear answer to that but it is the burning question especially since it is all still happening right under our noses. 

And many people are okay with that and just want to believe that all anyone really cares about are cute pictures of animals. 

....

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/dont_trust_the_government_with_your_privacy_property_or_your_freedoms

Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.

Consider for yourself.

Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.” For instance, all across the country, police are installing Flock Safety license plate readers as part of a public-private partnership program between police and the surveillance industry. These cameras, which upload data in real time to fusion crime centers, signal a turning point in the transition from a police state to a police-driven surveillance state.

Don’t trust the government with your property. In yet another effort to legitimize warrantless searches, police are employing “hit-and-hold” tactics in which police enter a home, carry out an initial sweep of the property, handcuff the occupants, then wait for official search warrants to be secured and applied retroactively. In the meantime, police have managed to bypass the Fourth Amendment. The rationale, to prevent possible destruction of evidence, is the same one used to deadly effect with no-knock raids. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $31.3 trillion and growing, and we’re paying more than $300 billion in interest every year on that public debt, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.

Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very far back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.

Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.