“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” ~George Orwell
An empire of lies requires popular devotion to its founding illusions, lest it will collapse under the weight of its own hubris. It is therefore quite necessary to for those in power to control information and public access to ideas and narratives that run counter to their interests. This is a fact of life in a statist world; but now, in the age of the internet and social media, we are quickly learning just how far corporations will go to support this corrupt dynamic.
Amendment 1 – Freedom of Religion, Speech, and the Press
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The social media giants along with big tech no longer have any qualms about deleting popular channels and personalities for their platforms, and the illusion of free speech is coming unhinged as we speak.
Just last week, Facebook (FB) announced the deletion of hundreds of pages it said were guilty of spamming and of profiting from Web-traffic sent to ‘ad farms’ from coordinated FB strategies. Well-respected and reputable independent media organizations were banned along with many obviously spammy pages and politically inconsequential sites, indicating that there is much more to the story than de-spamming FB. And all of this news follows the recent ban of Alex Jones and the Infowars network, which marked a transition from shadow banning to open, public political censorship by these tech companies.
There really is no way to know precisely what, or who, is driving these page bans, as pages on both sides of the political spectrum have been targeted; but the most visible common thread running through it all is political dissent of one form or another. And the bans are clearly coordinated between the social media companies, as targeted pages and news organizations are banned from multiple platforms (FB and Twitter, for example) on the same day.
So, the main avenues of public discourse on the Web today are removing dissident voices, which as journalist and activist John Vibes puts it, serves the same purpose of the free speech zones that G.W. Bush made popular during his controversial presidency.
Free speech zones are the ultimate insult to anyone who genuinely cares about the relationship between human beings and government. And we live in exceptionally controversial times, where the lines between government rule and corporate rule are blurrier than ever.
“Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you’ll always get some guy in your face who’s read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like “Facebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!” Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.” ~Caitlin Johnstone
So, now that we know that big tech is serving the interests of the political oligarchy, we are free to dissent in our own little corners of the Internet (where very few can hear us), but we can also create new alternatives that will allow us to connect with people without the permission and all-seeing eye of big brother watching over us.
In the meantime, it’s good to know that independent media is having such a tremendous impact on the conversation that the powers-that-be want to shut it all down. Their illusion of legitimacy is cracking.
Read more articles by Dylan Charles.
Dylan Charles is the editor of Waking Times and co-host of Redesigning Reality, both dedicated to ideas of personal transformation, societal awakening, and planetary renewal. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and enjoys spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world.
This article (Digital Free Speech Zones are Here) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to DylanCharles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
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