I decided a while back that I'm just going to document all the weird censorship activities that I personally encounter from giant social media corporations in order to have information available to the public so the hive mind can connect the dots on all the myriad ways that anti-establishment voices are being silenced. A lot of the tactics that these corporations are using to stifle dissent depend on the fact that they're occurring within individual social media accounts, and the only way to learn more about how those tactics are being used is for all of us to publicly share our own experiences with them.
It might look a little unusual, but in my opinion by making as much anti-establishment noise as I can and then documenting all the ways my voice is silenced and marginalized I'm performing a useful journalistic service to the new media landscape. In a corporatist system of government, wherein corporate power is not separate in any meaningful way from government power, corporate censorship is government censorship. It's important to learn how these quasi-governmental surveillance-based Silicon Valley corporations are protecting the establishment on which their plutocratic dynasties are built.
Before I go on, let me remind my audience that last year Twitter openly admitted to censoring the #DNCLeaks hashtag in the lead up to the 2016 election to prevent it from trending, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey blatantly lied about doing at the time. Let me also remind you that Twitter, along with Facebook and Google, was asked on the Senate floor a few months ago to take measures to "silence" rebellious voices in order to "prevent the fomenting of discord" in America.
A few days ago I documented how my Twitter follower count was apparently being artificially throttled by some sort of algorithm, a phenomenon that has been reported by many others. Since that time my follower throttling appears to have either diminished or ceased, but I’m seeing indications of yet another form of sneaky censorship being used by the social media giant.
A month or two ago I noticed that there were a bunch of names on my Twitter "mute" list, which I made a note of because I never use the "mute" function on Twitter; if I want someone out of my life I block them, which is a different function with a separate list of its own. I cleared off everyone who was on that list and added them to my block list, erroneously assuming that I'd intended to block them but muted them accidentally and then forgotten about them.Today a reader I'm familiar with notified me that I'd been added to his "mute" list somehow, which he would never do. This led me to check my own mute list again, and I found that two names had been added to it who I've definitely never blocked or muted.
I checked on both accounts, and neither are the sort of pro-MSM establishment Democrat who tend to give me a hard time. One supports WikiLeaks and expresses skepticism of the establishment Russia narrative, and the other appears to be a Trump supporting "Qanon"/pedogate type. The latter is currently going by the monicker "#Shadowban Girl" because since she joined Twitter she has noticed her voice being stifled. If she is being added to the mute lists of potential followers, this would explain why.
And that's all I have on this. Maybe it's something, maybe it's a fluke, but experience has taught me that it's always better to say something either way so that the information is out there. If you're an active Twitter user, please do check your mute list by going to "Settings and privacy", then clicking "Muted accounts" and selecting "All". If you see anyone on that list who you don't think you muted, let us know in the comments section of wherever you're reading this, and if not let us know too. It's important to get the information out there either way.
It's not okay for these powerful corporations to manipulate our personal social media settings to prevent us from viewing anti-establishment content. If you notice anything weird, make as much noise about it as possible so that we can all see what's going on. We've all got to do everything we can to fight establishment propaganda and speak truth to power, and that means making as much space for ourselves as we can on the largest platforms available.
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Although some of these instances may be caused by user error, it's quite obvious that they can't all be due to that reason. Neither can all instances of this be a coincidence or accidental. We are all too smart and up to date with their never ending and evolving tactics of censorship.
On another note, can twitter be charged with animal cruelty? They have taken the chirp out of their little bird by muting it.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Twitter is such a joke.
It might be helpful here to compare the situation to that in other countries. I used to think America (and by extension Australia, and Europe) were quite separate and distinct in this regard from China, where social control was authoritarian and draconian. If you spoke out in China, or were otherwise perceived as undesirable, you got sent to a re-education camp, where survival rates were often quite low. Your family members could suffer, too, if not from outright confinement and forced labor, then to a diminution of social and economic status, such that they could not attend University, or hold a significant employment status.
Lately, it seems that the U.S. is developing methods of political control, if not as worrisome as those of China, certainly sufficiently authoritarian enough to put the lie to the 1st Amendment and conventional notions of Freedom of the Press and Free Speech. These developments on Twitter and Facebook should be considered alongside the limitations and perversions of reporting, punditry, and communal discourse, wherein PACs and corporatist ownership constrain the flow of information to valorize the paymaster . Likewise, the specter of a Russian provenance is used to discredit information which runs afoul. Dissident portals not so branded [face a de facto blackist}(https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/18/cens-j18.html) from algorithms which obscure their presence on Google or conceal their posts to a Facebook timeline.
Twitter is of course banned in China (along with Facebook, Google, and the like), which on the surface seems an example of draconian censorship, but, in the context of Yasha Levine’s revelations about the nature of the Internet as a tool for government surveillance — combined with Caitlin’s observations here — suggest that any country which did not want untoward U.S. interference (or the interference of U.S. based corporations) would seek to develop its own internet platforms. How the respective governments would regulate these platforms— and how the public reacts to these “regulations” — then becomes a subject for comparative study. Such comparative study is more than casually important, because globalization suggests that the least common denominator of social control, as well as business practices, working conditions,, and other matters, may come to dominate in a world where national, cultural, and other geographic barriers, are rendered increasingly permeable.
In China, it has long been the practice to evade government surveillance through metaphor, or indirect reference. One talks about things by talking about something else, with the assumption that the receiver of the message is capable of intuiting the analogy. This is still the case, but works only so long as the government fails to catch on. When it does, it clamps down hard, detaining people for messaging in ways which would seem to the outsider as innocuous. Several examples of this are discussed in the Globe and Mail article linked here. One reads:
"Two women in Wuhan, Huang Fangmei and Geng Caiwen, were detained, according to the The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Ms. Huang had uploaded a video of her cheerily chanting “qing zhuyi daoche!”, a warning that a vehicle is backing up — and, in this case, a reference to China sliding backwards."
Caught disobeying, your account doesn’t simply shed as many followers as it retains; it disappears, along with all your content. Your network vanishes, along with the virtual self, and others, therein. And if you want something else to worry about, China’s developed a social credit score evocative of Dark Mirror’s Episode 1 of Season 3, and has begun to deploy it for such seemingly routine transactions as buying train tickets. This to me does not seem to be a difference in kind, but only of degree, as it used to be the case that one could only get train tickets in China by having a good relationship with someone in the office which sold them. But the ability of technological developments to put a finer point on social controls does seem worrisome.
We can ponder the relative demerits of being branded a dissident and corporeally and otherwise punished, and the necessity to keep our views silent or secret when we know the firm hand of the State would smote us should we express them; versus the anomie of never gaining traction because our tree falls in a forest when there’s no one around. For the present, it seems that the Internet Lords of the Western Apps are confining us to our quarters, limiting the contagion of revolutionary or potentially disruptive discourse to a circumscribed following. Caitlin is proposing that we compare notes to monitor this corralling, with a view to seeing whether or not our woke perspectives will either be allowed to break out, or that we will be resourceful enough to break out of the constraints thus applied. While applauding these efforts, another hope is that the growing international character of these platforms will confound the censors, who as yet are culturally and linguistically specific in their methods of control.
I checked mine, but so far Twitter hasn't muted anybody I wasn't aware of.
I follow you on Medium.com. For months I was notified by email of your latest piece pretty much on a daily basis. About a month ago, the notifications of your pieces stopped and I’m now getting notifications of random pieces written by people I don’t follow.
Has anyone else reported this?
is it twitter meddeling in the database, is it external agencies hacking or manipulating data thats in transit?
at what scale does it take place?
wow, thanks for that idea to check... I found 140 muted accounts on my list. wow and just more or less at the same time twitter locked my account for the second time this month, maybe I should stop following the truth tellers ;) or stopping tweeting stuff about human rights and boycotting israel and so on...