in Featured World News Don’t Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech
By Caitlin Johnstone
Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.
The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.
It’s actually pretty comical at this point, once you notice it. It’s like if you had an expensive Prada bag that your friend really coveted and she was always making up excuses to try and take it home with her. “Gosh I’m carrying all these small objects and I have nothing to carry them in!” “You’re going on vacation? I’ll look after your Prada bag for you!” “Oh no you slipped and now you’re clinging to a cliff’s edge! Quick! Throw me your Prada bag!” Once you know what they’re actually after, their attempts to obtain it look clownish and silly.
Caitlin Johnstone: The Obedient Censors at Meta https://t.co/M2ewa4zK1A
A monopolistic Silicon Valley mega-corporation deleting political speech about an important historical figure because Washington says he was a terrorist is a notably brazen act of censorship. pic.twitter.com/JooPenFZfY— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) January 7, 2022
Whenever I talk about how the immense power structure which the mass media serves and protects has a desperate need to control online speech, I’ll always get a few people objecting that the powerful don’t care about what ideas and information the ordinary riff-raff share with each other on internet forums. They just do what they want regardless of public opinion, like Greek gods on Mount Olympus.
And really nothing could be further from the truth. Controlling the thoughts we think about our nation and our world are of paramount importance to our rulers, because it’s only by controlling what we think that they can control how we vote, how we act, and whether or not we get fed up with being exploited and oppressed by a loose alliance of unelected plutocrats and government operatives. There is nothing, literally nothing, that these people would not do to maintain this control. Their very survival depends on it.
Michael Parenti summed this up perfectly in his 2015 book Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies with this passage that was recently shared by Louis Allday:
full story at https://www.activistpost.com/2022/01/dont-underestimate-how-badly-the-powerful-need-control-of-online-speech.html