When words get you killed… Internet censorship just took a massive leap forward… Who watches the watchers?… In the mailbag: “Congress drank the Kool-Aid long ago”…
Most of the attention in the mainstream press was on the disappearance of a Saudi-born journalist for The Washington Post – Jamal Khashoggi.
He had been a supporter of the new Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who took power there last year. But lately, he’s turned more critical of bin Salman’s leadership.
On October 2, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to pick up some papers he needed to get married.
He never came out.
According to Turkish authorities, a hit squad of 15 Saudis tortured, and then murdered Khashoggi, inside the consulate.
The Turks say they have audio recordings of the whole thing.
They also say the Saudis brought a doctor of forensic medicine with them to Turkey – equipped with a bone saw – to help them dismember the journalist’s body and bring it back to Saudi Arabia packed in suitcases.
Message to journalists: Don’t be too critical of bin Salman, or you’ll end up in a suitcase like Khashoggi.
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant announced it had purged 800 independent publishers from its platform.
Facebook claims these publishers were flooding Facebook users with politically motivated spam.
This is not a left versus right thing. And it goes deeper than partisan politics.
Going through the list of banned media organizations, it’s clear that Facebook silenced alternative news sources across the political spectrum.
One of the pages Facebook “unpublished” – management’s new politically correct term for “censored” – was by an outfit that claims it was “the first publication to support Donald J. Trump.” Another was called The Right Wing… another was called The Voice of Trump’s Deplorables.
But another page that Facebook deleted was of the left-leaning Reasonable People Unite page. Another was called We Miss You Obama. And another was called Young Progressive Voices.
And many of the purged pages were members of the alternative press with libertarian and anti-establishment views. (Sound familiar?)
You can also get an idea of what other kind of organizations were purged from their names: The Free Thought Project, The Anti-Media, Punk-Rock Libertarians, End the Drug War, Skeptic Society, I Only Owe You Non-Aggression, V Is for Voluntary, and Libertarian for President 2020.
These aren’t rinky-dink outfits, either. The Free Thought Project had 3.1 million Facebook followers. The Anti-Media had 2.1 million followers.
It’s hard not to look through a partisan lens these days. But the purge isn’t aimed at Republicans or Democrats… conservatives or liberals.
It’s aimed at ALL anti-establishment thought and dissent.
Many of the folks who got “unpublished” from Facebook also got kicked off Twitter.
For instance, after Facebook ripped down their pages, Twitter suspended the accounts of The Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media and their editors.
Facebook also expelled independent media organizations that “watch the watchers.”
A number of the pages it shut down produced stories, memes, and videos that focused on government overreach… especially overreach by the police.
These included Police the Police, Filming Cops, and No Victim No Crime.
And as Legacy Research co-founder Doug Casey has been warning, if any government organization needs to be watched in the U.S., it’s the police. Doug…
The fact is that police forces throughout the U.S. have been militarized. Every little town has a SWAT team, sometimes with armored personnel carriers. All of the Praetorian style agencies on the federal level – the FBI, CIA, NSA, and over a dozen others like them – have become very aggressive.
Every single day in the U.S., there are scores of confiscations of people’s bank accounts, and dozens having their doors broken down in the wee hours of the night… The police are a bigger threat to your property and your liberty, not to mention your life, than actual criminals.
The company released a statement co-written by its Head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.
Before moving to Facebook, Gleicher was Director of Cybersecurity Policy at the U.S. National Security Council in the White House. In the statement, he said the independent media groups it shut down were guilty of “inauthentic behavior.”
According to Facebook, this means using “sensational political content – regardless of its political slant – to build an audience and drive traffic to their websites.”
This is almost identical to the language Google used when it threatened to remove all ads from Legacy Research unless we kept away from certain ideas and damped down how we communicate them. (Catch up on what happened in full here.)
It simply means this: If you publish independent, anti-establishment ideas, and try to find an audience for those ideas, they will shut you down.
Most folks these days are so intolerant of ideas they don’t agree with… they’re happy to see them shut down by censors.
Many even applauded the censors when Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Spotify launched a coordinated attack on “shock jock” Alex Jones. As we wrote at the time…
But this is not about whether you approve of Jones or not. It’s about Facebook, Google, and other Silicon Valley monopolies deciding what you can (and can’t) see online.
It doesn’t matter whether you approve of Jones – or the other sites purged by Facebook. Freedom of speech means allowing folks to say stuff you don’t approve of.
And that idea seems to be lost on most folks these days.
I (Chris) will be leading two panel discussions about the growing threat of censorship online… and how to survive the assault on ideas.
Helping me get to the bottom of what’s going on will be Legacy’s own Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Jeff Clark, Dan Denning, and Jeff Brown.
I’ll also be talking with Emmy award-winning reporter John Stossel and conservative pundit Glenn Beck – who both left the mainstream media behind to start their own alternative media channels.
Don’t worry if you can’t attend the event in person. We’ll be livestreaming the whole thing, so you can watch it in the comfort of your home. To get access… and join remotely… read on here.
After we told you about blockchain-based social media platform Steemit, one reader is keen to give Facebook the boot…
New technology that impedes and/or prohibits the insidious schemes of Facebook, Google, etc. peaks my interest. I created a Facebook account earlier this year to appease a family member, but I don’t use it. Zuckerberg is the epitome of evil in my opinion, and Congress drank the Kool-Aid long ago. If there’s another way to communicate and safeguard my privacy, I’m going to look into it. Thanks for this new information!
– J.M.
Have you used Steemit to escape the censors? Will you still use Facebook after its latest assault on liberty? Write us at [email protected].
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
October 15, 2018
Delray Beach, Florida