The New York Times (8/6/18) invites us to pity the Chinese teens who are deprived of US tech giants.
Among mainstream US media, there’s a consensus that China is depriving its population, and possibly others, of the internet’s full capacities.
The New York Times invoked this trope last summer (8/6/18) when it fretted that “a generation” was coming of age without access to such US-founded internet companies as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (a Facebook property) and Google, whose availability is restricted in China. Instead, Chinese youth were using Chinese-founded platforms, including social-media service Weibo, search engine Baidu and shortform-video application Tik Tok.
By dint of their internet options, according to the Times, teenagers and 20-somethings living in China are excluded from the “Western liberal democracy” embodied on US platforms. The internet to which they’re exposed is censored, the Times contended—without elaboration of the forms said censorship took—and thus stripped of the values of free speech and expression employed on, say, Twitter or Google. The argument garnered an endorsement from Columbia Journalism Review (8/8/18) two days later.
The Washington Post (2/20/19) similarly wrung its hands via a February opinion piece. Written by a member of the historically US-aligned nonprofit Human Rights Watch, the op-ed expressed apprehension over the popularity of Chinese social-media platform WeChat, which it claimed censored posts containing “‘sensitive words’—such as Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo and Occupy Central.”
A Washington Post op-ed (2/20/19) warned against “the Chinese government’s use of WeChat as a surveillance tool”—ignoring Edward Snowden’s revelation that “the National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants” (Guardian, 6/7/13).
A month prior, the New York Times (1/23/19) warned that censorship was intensifying as China “appear[ed] to block Microsoft’s Bing,” and that “the Chinese internet was developing into a series of walled gardens, rather than the sprawling forum for ideas that makes online life appealing to many.” (Service resumed two days later; Reuters—1/27/19—indicated that this wasn’t an intentional block, but rather the product of a technical error.)
Corporate US media, it would seem, are ready to decry apparent censorship when it originates in what’s deemed an enemy state. Yet when US tech companies demonstrate clear patterns of restricting information—particularly from figures and outlets with adversarial positions on US policy—the mainstream press fails to sound the same alarm.
A number of left-leaning activists, media organizations, and governments have seen their presences flagged and minimized on US tech platforms. In one example, in 2017, a number of publications often critical of Western policy—AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams, Global Research and Truthout, among others—claimed that their Google-directed traffic sank as much as 63 percent in the wake of a Google algorithm change designed to bust the ill-defined specter of “fake news.” Simultaneously, many of corporate media’s heavy hitters—namely, the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN—appeared to have been spared.
Accordingly, and in contrast to their extensive consternation about China, these publications remained mostly mum on the issue. While the New York Times (9/26/17) published one story on these claims of left-media censorship, neither the Washington Post nor CNN appears to have reported on the matter.
Other examples abound. Last year, YouTube prevented videos rebuking Israeli militarism from being broadcast in such countries as the United Kingdom, France and Italy. Last month, Twitter temporarily restricted the account of TeleSur English, which has opposed the US’s attempted coup in Venezuela and US foreign policy more generally.
In February, Facebook suspended the account of digital video production company In the Now for its indirect connection to RT, a private media organization funded by the Russian government; Facebook eventually reinstated the account, contingent on In the Now disclosing its funding. (As Jim Naureckas observed for FAIR—3/1/19—such US and UK government-subsidized outlets as NPR, the BBC and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty aren’t required to disclose funding.)
The US corporate press not only fails to condemn this marginalization, but also actively enables it. In July 2018, Facebook announced that, in response to panic over Russian election meddling, it had “removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Multiple pages related to anti-colonialist subjects, and at least one of those pages was that of an anti-fascist coalition—Shut It Down DC—raising a red flag regarding Facebook’s shadowy vetting procedures. Publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox and Mother Jones parroted Facebook’s narrative (In These Times, 8/2/18), providing no evidence of a connection between these groups and Russia.
Another Washington Post op-ed (2/25/19) complained not just about China’s censorship but about its “onerous privacy rules,” which discriminate against US companies whose business models depend upon invasion of privacy.
This skewed coverage stems from a sense of chauvinism; outlets like the Times and Post imply that the freest, most democratic internet paradigm is the one developed and used by Westerners. Exemplifying this point, a February Washington Post op-ed (2/25/19) maintained that China was putting the “future of the global internet at risk.” The piece went on to suggest that, in prioritizing the development of its own tech platforms over Western ones, China was further instituting a policy of “censorship” and “digital authoritarianism.” Further, it cited the NATO-championing Council on Foreign Relations to portray China’s tech sector as an impediment to “foreign competitors”—i.e., the US.
A similar sentiment appeared in a New York Times editorial (10/25/18) that warned that, in the future, “America’s [internet] won’t necessarily be the best.” In the wake of news that Google may be developing a Chinese search engine known as Dragonfly—a move Vox called “bad for humanity” (8/17/18)—the board bemoaned the notion that “American companies that once implicitly pushed democratic values abroad” may want to do business with the Chinese government.
US media have demonstrated an inveterate double standard for the concept of “censorship,” applying far more stringent criteria to countries that are the targets of US aggression than to the US and its allies. Corporate outlets’ insistence that the US’s configuration of the internet is “free” is a justification for homegrown platforms’ bolstering of Washington’s empire. Moreover, these outlets’ trepidation that China’s technological development poses a global threat is a condescending, thinly veiled avowal of Western supremacy. US media aren’t making useful prescriptions for a free internet; they’re merely stoking the flames of the new Cold War.
Isn’t it necessary to make a distinction between Western hypocrisy and market mongering, and legitimate concern over Chinese gummint censorship?
I don’t want Google colluding with any state’s desire to control its citizenry.
Yes, perhaps, but this sort of misses a larger point. The concern cited in this article about “teenagers and 20-somethings living in China are excluded from the ‘Western liberal democracy’ embodied on US platforms” is the key here, as well as the astute statement that “this skewed coverage stems from a sense of chauvinism.” As the late Domenico Losurdo wrote about extensively (e.g., “Liberalism: A Counter-History”), the essence of political liberalism is a false universalism and a politics of exclusion, and liberals expend most of their effort trying to police a line about worthy recipients of liberal freedoms and those unworthy and excluded from the liberal community of the free (or as Hillary Clinton’s Freudian slip put it, “deplorables”). As Andrew Levine recently put it, “What all this [Russiagate hysteria] goes to show is that, at root, what sets the blood of our political and media leaders boiling is not foreign meddling or colluding or violating the ‘sanctity’ of one or another of our vaunted institutional arrangements. It is getting their friends and enemies lists wrong.” (“Russiagate is Not Watergate” CounterPunch, 4/5/2019). One gets a clear sense here from the MSM that Westerners in the USA are “worthy” of running “free” platforms; the Chinese are supposedly not. This can be called chauvinism. We can supplement Losurdo’s philosophical analysis here with Michael Hudson’s sadly overlooked book “Trade, Development and Foreign Debt”, which explains how the “free trade” advocated by political liberals actually encourages economic polarization, contrary to its proponents’ claims. It isn’t actually hypocrisy, though. Liberals *sincerely* believe this nonsense. The problem, in the strictest sense, is a mixture of disavowal (verleugnung) and a bit of old-fashioned incompetency. What liberals disavow is that, similar to reactionaries, they support and encourage a hierarchical society, and construe social “error” as people being out of place in that hierarchy–they just draw up a slightly different hierarchy than reactionaries and unconvincingly claim that these slight differences in degree are categorical differences. Liberal freedoms are construed as those that conform to this hierarchy (it’s why the U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, interprets civil rights in terms of a few discrete “protected classes”, which in unmistakably a liberal notion). The idea that freedoms apply universally in an egalitarian manner is totally antithetical to political liberalism. To point here is that “censorship” is justified against enemies, the “non-all”, and “homo sacer” (in Giorgio Agamben’s usage) under liberalism and when liberals invoke concepts like freedom, censorship, etc. they always do so against the ideological presupposition that a social hierarchy is necessary and such concepts either apply or don’t apply based on that ideology.
Tveten’s excellent article makes quite clear that there are unspoken, disavowed ideological presuppositions at work in these MSM accounts. By articulating them in a coherent way, the false universalism at play in the MSM is exposed, and therefore this article helps readers articulate the situation of unfreedom in which they find themselves.
A state has a legitimate interests in control[ling] its citizenry.” Isn’t that the very definition of a state? The political question is whose interests the state rules on behalf of. For instance, Julian Assange’s “When Google Met Wikileaks” admirably exposes the (publicly disavowed and concealed) relationship between Google and the U.S. government military/surveillance apparatus, in order to highlight the essentially undemocratic character of this collusion. Jeffrey Reiman’s classic book on criminal justice “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison” is another example of this, showing how the criminal justice system in the USA is set up to benefit the rich and systematically excludes the activities of the rich from its purview. It is entirely possible to envision a society in which the state criminalizes the conduct of a company like Google, or, say, “censors” false advertising. But it’s a political question of whose interests the state protects–those of all people (or at least all citizens) or just a small class of elites?
I grew up w/o Google, Facebook, or Twitter!
Hmmm … I’m wondering if you have nothing more to say has something to do with that?
Lets see how fair Fair is as to whether it walks its talk.
All the media tech companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Pinterest are quite willing if not eager to go full censorship in complying with California Democrat Representative Adam Schiff https://schiff.house.gov/news/press-releases/schiff-sends-letter-to-google-facebook-regarding-anti-vaccine-misinformation and censoring any one who speaks unkindly about vaccinations made by drug companies notorious for their greed and willingness to commit fraud and criminal behavior https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pointed out —you remember him?– environmental attorney, son of Bobby Kennedy.
Q: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LIBERALISM?
A: Cognitive dissonance in the age of #Phascism
The Amended Liberal Credo:
1. Censorship is bad except when it comes to vaccines
2. ”Informed consent” should apply to every medical product and intervention — except vaccines
3. America should honor her treaty obligations under the Nuremberg Code and the ethical precepts of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights — except where they impede forced vaccination
4. Every medicine should be safety tested — except vaccines
5. Pharma is greedy, homicidal and untrustworthy — except about vaccines
6. Mercury and aluminum are dangerous neurotoxins — except in vaccines
7. LISTEN TO WOMEN — except about vaccines
8. ”MY BODY, MY CHOICE — except with vaccines
9. Glyphosate and formaldehyde cause cancer — except in vaccines
10. Borax, banned in food — but not in vaccines
11. Vaccines are so unavoidably unsafe they need legal immunity, yet so incredibly safe that it’s ethical to mandate them
12, Agencies get captured — except with vaccines
13. People in power lie — except about vaccines
14. Industry falsifies climate science — but not vaccine safety science
15. QUESTION AUTHORITY — but not about vaccines
16. Critical thinking and skepticism are democratic virtues — but not about vaccines
17. Never govern by fear — except with vaccines
18. Demagoguery, scapegoating, hate speech, cruelty and bullying are wrong — except about anti-vaxxers (aka: the moms of intellectually disabled children)
19. Banning minority children from schools and public places is reprehensible — except with the unvaccinated
WOW…that’s an amazing list, Michael, and all true!
Can’t we have a civilized conversation about vaccine safety before yet another generation of children are poisoned with these unregulated toxic pharmaceuticals?
So we should just let our children die of measles?
Elephant in the living room, Michael… Ironic that FAIR started in 1986, the year of the removal of liability from vaccine manufacturers through passage of the Vaccine Liability Act. The beginning of the End. It’s amazing what the populace can get indoctrinated into and tolerant of, with the help of fear promoted by greed. Throw in the deterioration of critical thinking skills and massive information overload and we have great conditions for an Orwellian State. Once folks willingly sacrifice the health of their own children, what more is there to lose? Next to hand out the pitchforks.
A dark age is here with massive corporate-directed censorship of what we have become accustomed to thinking is unimpeded access to news and current events on the Internet. There is no doubt, none at all, that vaccines cause autism. I told our future pediatrician a month before my daughter was born that I did not want her to get the hep-B vaccine at birth, as I had read it often caused autism. He agreed, but didn’t tell me it was the hospital staff I should tell, not him. And they gave it to her at midnight the day she was born without my knowledge or permission. A special legal loophole permits this. And, like hundreds of thousands of other babies since 1991, when universal hep-B vaccination of newborns was begun, she reacted with vaccine encephalitis, constant, inconsolable screaming for four days and nights. (But the symptoms are often more subtle, blank staring episodes, petit mal seizures, hard to spot in a newborn, or excessive somnolence.) I foolishly allowed her to get three DTaPs at 2, 4, and 6 months old, but she got pertussis anyway at eight months old, because the acellular pertussis vaccine is miserably ineffective and continues to be just as dangerous as the DPT, often causing asthma, allergies, seizure disorders, SIDS, and autism. Etc. She had started saying two words by 18 months, delayed by the encephalitic brain damage, but progressing. Then she got the DTaP booster at that time and it erased her only two words. She was diagnosed with autism two months later, and is still low-verbal and developmentally-delayed at nearly 19.
A congressional safety hearing on the hep-B vaccine in May 1999 found that it was a very dangerous vaccine which should certainly never be given with mercury. So Merck promised to take it out of Recombivax, but it didn’t add that it was going to sell existing mercury-containing stock until its expiration date several years later. So my newborn got a mercury-containing vaccine at less than 24 hours old, and reacted with symptoms of mercury poisoning (a rash, sweating all over her head even in cool rooms, and copious drooling until she was ten years old) as well as symptoms of vaccine encephalitis (high-pitched screaming, stiff belly, and arched back, in agony from her swollen brain). Judy Converse, Mike Belkin (whose newborn was killed by the vaccine), and school nurse Patti White testified, White saying that this program was responsible for the tsunami of autistic Missouri kindergartners entering kindergarten from 1996 on. Converse wrote a book (When Your Doctor is Wrong: The Hepatitis-B Vaccine and Autism), about her newborn’s encephalitic reaction to the vaccine, also given at birth without her knowledge or permission, and it also caused autism in her son.
So, can we talk about what has resulted in one in 36 American children, the highest rate ever, being diagnosed with a devastating disability like autism? For many years the pharma industry has employed legions of shills to patrol the Internet and attack anyone who criticizes vaccines or has a vaccine-damaged child. So you learn to work around them. Everyone understands the game card. I have had a personal vaccine exemption for my daughter so she could go to public school (another sad story). So now the pharma industry, not content with its sweeping success and almost total mind control, has decided to bring in the outliers and force every child in the country, nay, every adult as well (see Bill de Blasio’s adult MMR mandate), to submit to all the vaccines they would like to sell us.
It doesn’t have a lot to work with. Measles and pertussis were often killer diseases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in developed countries, but the pathogens evolved to become relatively mild, so that both diseases had become routine childhood diseases by the mid-twentieth century. I had measles at six, before the vaccine: everyone did. In the US in 1960, there were three to four million cases of measles every year, the entire birth cohort, 99% of American children had natural immunity by the age of 18, as shown in blood tests of army recruits. There were 450 deaths a year, usually in malnourished or immunocompromised children. Supplemental vitamin A would now prevent most of these complications, and there is a nosode to prevent measles in those for whom it might be dangerous. So the truth is that both pertussis and measles are nearly always relatively mild diseases (newborns should be sheltered at home, protected with nosodes, treated with IV C for pertussis) and beneficial if you’ve never gotten the vaccines for them. I’ve had both of them, as well as chickenpox, flu, hep-A, rotavirus, and rubella. So what do you do to foist vaccines on the uninformed public? You lie, you exaggerate, you cheat, you get laws passed to compel vaccine receipt. And you do so by every means possible, saturation bombing, school, doctor’s office, hospital, news broadcasts, newspaper and magazine articles, posters. And you silence those talking about their conflicting experience which contradicts the easy, no-brainer “solution.” You make sure that pediatricians get a $400 bonus for children who get every last one of the numerous recommended vaccines by the age of two (which has added up to millions for some.) We call this carrots and sticks.
Natural measles improves immune function for life, and substantially prevents all kinds of cancer except breast cancer. Dr. Peter Aaby did a study in Senegal which showed that in the 90% of African children who recovered from natural cases of measles, there was only one-fifth the all-cause mortality in subsequent years as in those who did not get the disease, whether because they got the dangerous vaccine or just did not get measles. Natural measles is THAT good for your lifetime health. Many studies have shown the many health benefits of going through the natural febrile childhood diseases in childhood.
So now that increasing numbers of Americans (and others) are learning about the extreme dangers of vaccines for many and about the nature of the vaccine-preventable diseases, very few of which would be great dangers even if no one vaxxed for them, the pharma companies, the most powerful lobby in the country after the defense industry, has seen the handwriting on the wall and has cracked down on free speech and uncoerced informed consent to a dangerous medical procedure, and has unleashed a variety of strategies all designed to enforce national vaccine conformity.
Proposed bills have been written by the pharma industry, which is attempting to ram them through both state and national legislatures in a ruthless Blitzkrieg, to eliminate exemptions from vaccines in order to attend any kind of school. They even have homeschoolers in their sights, and we saw in Rockford County, NY, last month that they tried to criminalize unvaxxed children (only those under 18 at that time) from being in any public place. I saw one proposed bill that was even going to eliminate the medical exemption. Even the California mandate four years ago specified that schoolchildren already on an IEP were exempt from the mandate, everyone realizing that they and their parents had already paid their dues to the pharma industry, emerging with permanently and severely brain-damaged children.
I have commented a lot on the Internet for the last eight years. At the time of the campaign to push through the draconian California mandate, a company was hired by the vaccine industry to shill all over the Internet, but not only that, but to install its employees as moderators on dozens of websites, where they just deleted months of my comments on many different sites with the push of a button. Once one of them interrupted my discussion with another commenter, obliterating my comments as I was writing them, then following me to other sites where I told my interlocutor to follow me to continue our discussion, where the *** moderator continued his assault, covering my comment with a black box and then preventing me from even typing.
And now I’m blacklisted. Many sites send my comments into moderator jail as soon as I click Post, from whence they are never seen again. Or an hour later they have been “detected as spam,” and deleted, even though they are not spam, just unwelcome discourse.
Most institutions of our society have been corrupted by this massive effort to enforce the universal consumption of every possible vaccine. Legislators, educators, journalists, television producers, and every member of the medical and pharmaceutical industry, all are led by a comprehensive program of carrots and sticks to toe the party line.
For the past month, if I put a vaccine-related word into Google, it freezes up and will not give me any results. I now use Duck Duck Go and Yandex instead, which continue to give me results in the normal way. Amazon is now into book burning. It has taken books off of their platform when it disapproves of their political agenda. I bought the excellent book Tommy Robinson’s Koran on Amazon two years ago: two copies really, when I misplaced my first one. There is nothing objectionable about it: it is a meticulously and professionally edited version of the venerable Pickthall translation, word for word complete and correct, but in a more comprehensible order, and with a fascinating, completely documented introduction. But the name Tommy Robinson is the kiss of death, and it was taken off of Amazon about two months ago. There is no longer even a record of my two purchases of it in my record of Amazon purchases. It’s now sold at a dedicated website, where I bought another copy out of indignation. I’m now reading Forrest Maready’s The Autism Vaccine, another book which was kicked out of Amazon even before it was published, only based on its title. It is also an excellent book, a detailed history of contagious diseases and the development of vaccines for them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I already knew quite a bit, but I have learned a lot more from the book. I am happy that Maready recognizes how devastating a disease diphtheria was from the mid-nineteenth century on, the countless thousands of babies and small children killed horribly by it, as background to what a godsend the toxin-antitoxin treatment and the toxoid vaccine were. I was unaware of the reasons leading to the inclusion of aluminum as an adjuvant: two different kinds (so far, I’m not done with the book), the second much more satisfactory than the first, leading to less serum sickness. And of course I can see where we’re heading, to the aluminum’s causing severe disease in many, but hey! that’s reality, and all of us need to know about it and think about it carefully. Yes, diphtheria was a HORRIBLE and very common disease a hundred years ago, and also yes, the vaccines all sometimes caused horrendous, disabling, even fatal reactions. True, true, true. Why are we being chivvied into one camp or the other, totally pro-vax or totally anti-vax? This is a balanced book filled with documented observations and history. But apparently only because of the title, Amazon banned it sight unseen. If Amazon doesn’t like the juxtaposition of the words “autism” and “vaccine,” well, that’s it, that’s reason enough to prohibit everyone from buying the book on its platform.
And WHY is our ability to inform ourselves and to learn as much as possible about these very serious and life-altering issues in order to permit us to make rational judgments and decisions? Does Big Pharma REALLY think that it can put that cat back into the bag? My daughter has autism from two vaccine reactions, I have MS and Asperger’s from my own vaccine reactions (tetanus booster paralyzed both arms starting the same day, brachial plexus neuropathy, later diagnosed as sometimes-paralyzing MS by MRI), my father was paralyzed by a flu vaccine for the last three years of his life, and my mother developed Alzheimer’s from their annual ritual of getting the flu vaccine at the mall. You can see that we have inherited genetic factors which predispose us to vaccine reactions. They think they can either force people to reinterpret our experience in a way which exonerates vaccines, or marginalize us, with media censorship one strategy, so that as few as possible are aware of this experience shared now by many millions?
This article is the most insane example of whataboutism I’ve ever read!
Hi anti vaccine parents: FREEDOM— is it really?
if you wish, you too may have deaf, physically compromised or hey—- even dead kids. But doesn’t it amaze you that back when vaccines were given to all school kids , we didn’t have these medical disasters ?
Measles did not used to be a public health menace. However, we have that greedy and murderous Sackler family and Big Pharma—–what shall we do with them?
“And thus stripped of the values of free speech and expression employed on, say, Twitter or Google.”
Go to Twitter. Press a report button on a random Tweet. You’ll find you’re able to report the tweet for “hate speech” – something US Supreme Court recognized isn’t a thing .
On Twitter, I got locked out for saying that some illegal aliens commit crime.
Another time – most recent – ended up permanently banned for mentioning history of Islam, specifically Islamic conquests of Balkans, India, etc. It was a conversation, and simply historical facts – it was deemed “hateful.”
Megan Murphy, a feminist, got banned for saying that men aren’t women. If you misgender someone – you get banned.
“Hate facts” are a thing. Hate facts get banned.
The point being, there is no free speech on Twitter. Being able to report “Hate speech” alone – a concept originating from feminists & critical race theorists – demonstrates that.
And yet the mainstream media, leftists, Democrats, SJW’s and so forth are all screaming for more hate speech laws and “fake news” {read: stuff they don’t agree with & censorship} here in the U.S. then act all shocked when the shoe turns up on the other foot. Seriously?
AOC is right about social media, and Tveten is right about the net. Don’t which is worse, what gov does or how media report it.
“In one example, in 2017, a number of publications often critical of Western policy—AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams, Global Research and Truthout…”
I have no problem with any of these outlets. I have had a problem with comments removed from MoJo’s fb page, and a while back one under a share on Ray McGovern’s page (though rather than blame him I suspected intermediaries). Last night and today I commented under the Stephen Cohen interview at TRNN. They didn’t go up. I’ll combine my points I tried to make with Tveten’s theme here: Even liberal orgs seem to take sweeping stands on issues–the trend seems to be you’re either in the trough of an issue or on the crest of an issue, and the waves just march along. There’s no inbetween (the exception would be like The Intercept which does publish stuff by James Risen). My point under the Cohen interview was that…no, IMO the meddling didn’t determine everything (election), but that, given people’s understanding of things cyber, you could see where the paranoia comes from. It’s not the nature of the net itself IMO, but the way it’s being exploited by the right–let me make that take of mine plain. If you like anarchy, then take a CLOSE look at the net, and think again. I tried to link four articles at TRNN, but here are just two…
“Death by data: how Kafka’s The Trial prefigured the nightmare of the modern surveillance state” (2014)
https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/death-data-how-kafkas-trial-prefigured-nightmare-modern-surveillance-state
some astute comments under this “New Zealand’s XKEYSCORE Use” (2015)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/new_zealands_xk.html
I tried to link a Masha Gessen interview over there as well; does TRNN not like Gessen?
“‘Western liberal democracy’ embodied on US platforms.”
I threw up in my mouth a little when I read that. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Absolutely so. Strange isn’t it that in this seemingly never-ending lambasting of Russia, China (and Iran), that we never seem to hear about, in the MSM on either side of the Atlantic, the really existing legal curbs on freedom of speech in such places as the UK? In Britain there is the “D” notice which the government of the day can slap on items of information (cloaked as national security/secrets) they do not want publicized in the media.
Meanwhile such state supported (in the UK the Beeb is completely tax payer, via the government, funded, therefore it is a state-controlled media set up, which is how they always describe Russian media with !shock horror!) never rest with their dis- and misinformation, with their omitting of relevant facts, opposing voices, positions as well as spouting outright lies in true Orwellian fashion.
Thought policing is widespread in establishment circles. In response to an attack on RT, I tried to post on FaceBook
“If I want to complain about government news tampering, I will complain that alemarah-english.com/ seems to be being blocked from availability in the US.”
I tried to mention the link on Facebook, and the responder was the responder from Facebook was ‘you can’t post this link. Try again.’ For those not familiar with the site, it is the Taliban News service, presenting their positions on what they are fighting for and reporting on military outcomes not covered by our MSM. (Naturally, to be taken cum grano salis.). Fortunately, censorship can be defeated, so that alemarah dash english dot com/ and ale mar ah eng lish.com/ (omit spaces) transmits.