I’m not one who’s prone to thinking that things ever really get much worse very quickly. I tend to be skeptical when people say that we’ve turned a corner.
But in the recent past, we’ve had the TikTok ban (clearly became an urgent issue after it became a major vehicle for challenging media narrative about Israel among young people), Twitter and Facebook clearly taking orders from the US government and banning accounts for supporting Palestine, the arrests of the Sarah Wilkinson, the Telegram guy, and the other OSINT guy arrested at Heathrow (can’t remember his name).
But for me, it’s events just in the last week that have really caught my notice. The Electronic Intidada - relatively small but awesome website and channel on YouTube - got hit with a weeklong ban for reasons unknown. The Red Stream - a small website and Telegram channel - got called out by Lucifer himself (Antony Blinken) and they got bumped from YouTube. And just the other day, Light Herself was talking about how we should arrest and charge people when they spread “Russian disinformation” (you just know libs want to arrest people for saying inflation is too high as being “Russian disinformation”).
I don’t, it feels like things have rapidly accelerated just in the last couple months. Anyone else feeling this? Or do we still have a long way to go here before we can say things have actually gotten “bad”?
Yah these levels of censorship aren’t new. We have basically zero footage of Iraq and Afghanistan. The US learned its lesson with Vietnam where they allowed the media to broadcast pictures of kids being hit by napalm, extrajudicial killings of communists, or monks protesting US occupation. If you try and find similar content for the Middle East, you won’t. Even a photo of Americans in coffins was a scandal.
This goes back even further with Red Scares and McCarthyism. Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted by Hollywood for years despite committing zero crimes just because he was a communist. Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death on faulty evidence because being an anarchist was reason enough for a jury to convict them.