Platform Censorship: Book Burning of the 21st Century

This past week has seen another round of mass-purges from tech-giants Facebook and Twitter. Facebook terminated over 800 politically-oriented pages and accounts, many were alternative media related, including the popular pages of The Free Thought Project (3.1 million fans), The AntiMedia (2.1 million fans), and several pages that expose police brutality and crimes like Police the Police (1.9 million fans) and Cop Block (1.7 million fans). Even Press for Truth (350K fans) in Canada was banned. Twitter followed with the banning of many of the same accounts on it's platform.

All that time building a following gone in the blink of an eye. All that worked burned in a flash, up in smoke, in a flurry of flames.

_{mangostar/wikia - CC BY-SA 2.0}

It was another coordinated effort to rid their platforms of voices that some insiders don't agree with. The content being allowed on these platforms seems to be in the control of a few hands who want to silence those who dissent from their established norms and views that they expect people to have.

These platforms have a market place for information sharing, and they are steadily reducing the type of content being shared to people around the globe. This is creating a monopoly on information dissemination that they will control. When some people don't like what others are saying, they want to prevent them from saying it. They seem to hate free speech and freedom that many of these pages represent.

When alternative health pages were banned earlier this year from Facebook, few took notice. Then came the popular banning of Alex Jones which was championed by so many on the Left, and probably some on the Right who simply don't like him. But some Liberals are truer to the classical Liberalism of Liberty, like Noam Chomsky, who was against the banning of AJ from online platforms.

Many voiced their concerns that this was only the beginning. That it was only going to get worse. And it has. This is the road to dominating the mindset of billions of people by restricted the information that they can see in their one-stop market places for information access.

Tech giants that made their success by providing access to a market place are not taking control of who can speak. If you dare challenge the status quo, then you are a target for being silenced and removed from their platforms. Many of these platforms are run by Left-leaning people, from the ownership down.

The purges of this year would seem to coincide with the upcoming election which the Democrats are desperate to win. These mega-platform monopolies are now gate-keepers that are restricting political thoughts by restricting the access to information that forms opinions. It seems like collusion between the Democrats and the tech giants to influence the elections, which seems like a criminal thing to do. It looks like a conspiracy.

Monopolistic gatekeepers of free thought and speech have been around before, but usually in the form of totalitarian authoritarian governmental forces. Technology has changed things greatly. These tech giants are now the new gate keepers of the information market places they have become.

_{Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0}

Previous authoritarian regimes like that of the Nazis burned physical books to restrict and control what people could get access to. In Orwell's 1984 there was even the "memory hole" process where information was wiped from existence in order to control the narrative, historical record and future of the nation.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
- George Orwell, 1984

Now these tech giants are doing the same book burning of the modern age, by purging their information market places of all the content they don't approve that has been stored there and built for years. They can't burn all the data from the net, but they can burn it from their info market place. No longer can people access it. It has been "memory holed", removed from access.

The remaining information that aligns with the political motives of these decision-makers can now shape the future of a nation. Just like The Party in 1984. The election process can influenced based solely on the information the planners and controllers want people to have access to, to influenced them and shape their political opinions.

This is brainwashing in a large scale. Many people will believe what their told in a one-sided exposure to information as there is no alternative information to get them to think something else might be going on with stories about war, politics or other current events.

_{Public Domain/flickr}

But none of that matters. The government will take care of things. The government will protect us from ourselves. The police will protect you. You don't need to protect yourself or have more freedom. Just listen to the mainstream "authoritative" narrative that Youtube, Facebook and Twitter will feed you. All is well.

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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