The enormity of the forces brought against free speech cannot be understood simply by looking at any individual organization, like Facebook, because it’s a web of deceit incorporated by tax dollars to inhibit free speech on a global scale, but primarily against the Western nations who largely have free speech, rather than against truly authoritarian societies that don’t need it, they do that as a matter of practice.
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I think Trump's willingness to "make a deal" makes him capable of abandoning important principles.
ReplyDeleteI think you're wrong...
DeleteLooking at his first term proves you wrong. Mistakes were made, usually because he trusted his appointees to be as honest as him. If congress doesn't screw him over again, this should be an epic 4 years.
DeleteI think TL is sorta downplaying the origin date and extent of .gov's censorship efforts here and abroad. Probably not intentionally.
DeleteI believe the origins of U.S. gov's censorship started in the first Obama administration. Obama proved to have a very thin skin when people criticized his actions and speeches. Remember how many times, almost weekly, he cited Fox News' criticisms of him starting from his first weeks in office? This was back when Fox was the ONLY opposition news source in existence under Roger Ailes and almost none of the MSM propaganda media even covered Fox's comments or Obama's push back.
Then in 2012, Obama had his CONgressional cronies repeal the 1948 Smith–Mundt Act which had outlawed government propaganda being used on the American people. In other words, it allowed the government to both blatantly lie and to discredit any narrative not their own, i.e. censorship.
Then when Trump ran in 2016, they hatched what I characterize as the censorship industrial complex where they directed and in some cases PAID social media platforms Twitter, Facebook and Google to deplatform candidates they didn't like, like Trump, among others, all of whom were Republicans or very conservative Demonrats.
Then during Covid, under Bribem, they cranked censorship up to eleven discrediting and/or deplatforming the opinions of Doctors and microbiology researchers whose writings on Covid didn't fit the narrative.
The censorship industrial complex was revealed when Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. The Twitter files revealed the emails from .gov directing Twitter's censorship staff to delete posts they didn't like in minute detail. It was later revealed that Facebook and Instagram were also being directed in the same manner by the same organization.
MSM, NYT WAPO LAT and all of the three letter TV networks had always been on board with censorship. I've contended for a long time that some .gov agency was feeding narratives to MSM newsrooms. They didn't even bother in most cases to rewrite the lines they'd been fed, thus you'd hear the same message conveyed using the same words from any MSM TV source you tuned into. Remember the prememe days meme of different TV talking heads saying exactly the same thing that started with one and doubled every couple of seconds until the screen had 32 boxes of different talking heads all speaking the same words at the same time? That was a tell that most missed.
Now that social media platforms have been trained by .gov in what and whom to censor, I expect that they'll carry on with it maybe to a lessor degree, but it's NOT going away. It may even lie mostly dormant until Demonrats come back to power, if ever, because TV MSM, social media staff's and 99.9% of the so called "journalists" in this country and abroad are all far left loons who bow and scrape before .gov to get "the scoop", prostitutes and liars all.
Musk has said that they're going to dismantle the censorship apparatus in government. What they need to do is reinstate the Smith-Mundt Act, this time with felony level penalties for any .gov entity lying to "The People"(that includes to CONgress) or promulgating propaganda. Yeh, I know, good luck with that.
Nemo
I think it would depend on they were talking about and what was at risk.
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