Posted on 05/02/2022 5:05:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the dramas of ancient Greece, a hero would often struggle against impossible odds, on the brink of apparent oblivion, when suddenly a god figure would be lowered to the theater stage to solve the plot’s problems. This appearance of a “god from the machine” –deus ex machina– gets a bad rap in storytelling these days: it’s an easy, lazy way to end a complex tale. Modern problems do not get solved by divine intervention. Life is not that simple.
Well, that’s what half of the US population believed about Internet censorship for the past five years. Pummeled by an unrelenting procession of censors, fact-checkers, artificial intelligence wrongthink detectors, “Trust & Safety” teams, “disinformation” specialists, and “rapid response units” deployed to scan-and-ban opinions on breaking news events, America’s mythic hero – Free Speechicus – looked down and out.
Then suddenly, Elon Musk appeared. Musk, as if lowered by crane to the stage of democracy itself, now promises to put Pandora’s censorship monsters back in their box.
But can it really be that easy? All Free Speechicus needed was $44 billion this whole time?
No, not even close.
As a former State Department diplomat in charge of the “Big Tech” portfolio, I have had a privileged glimpse into the myriad forces driving modern Internet censorship. Having seen what Musk is up against first-hand, I feel little elation at the arrival of the Deus Ex Muskina.
From 2006 to 2016, censorship was an act. In the five years that followed, censorship became an industry. Its powerful stakeholders now span every major media conglomerate, every major online payment provider, every major US and UK college and university, hundreds of think tanks, NGOs and pressure groups, international regulatory and watchdog commissions, and is now firmly interwoven with the policies and operations of the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services.
Musk seems only now to be glimpsing what he’s up against. Last week, tech investor and Facebook board member Marc Andreesen tweeted that online censorship will become increasingly standardized, moving “up the stack” into cloud platforms, email clients, browsers, and operating systems.
It’s already happening. Just this week, Google embedded AI censorship into its Google Docs word processor to add friction for users engaged in wrongspeak. Microsoft already changed its Windows terms of service in 2019 to ban PC users engaged in undefined “hate speech.” Last week, Andreesen himself was listed in a “hate speech tracker” maintained by the ex-Twitter employee who used digital forensics to doxx the real-life identity of the anonymous “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account.
Elon Musk replied to Andreesen’s dark prediction not with godlike omniscience, but rather with the shock of a young Candide breaking from Panglossian innocence: “Extremely concerning. Who is pushing this censorship/deplatforming? Very shadowy.”
Shadowy indeed. Musk was certainly correct in his intuition to take Twitter private. No public company can presently survive the civil society encirclement of those who defy censorship orthodoxy. In 2020, mere double-digit billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — who just one year earlier bemoaned censorship going too far – quickly tapped out after Facebook lost $60 billion to an advertiser shakedown directed at the company for failing to censor hard enough. Such shakedowns are now a seasonal rite of passage for all social media companies.
Musk may be immunized against such civil society encirclement tactics. At $300 billion in net worth, a triple-digit billionaire may not break under the same commercial pressures put on mere millionaires or low-digit billionaires.
Inevitably, the censorship industry will promote rule-of-law pretexts to force Musk to crush a free speech Twitter. When this happens, it will not be a novel occurrence – history will have merely retweeted itself.
There’s a little-known secret history of how the first great wave of Internet censorship began in 2017. It didn’t start with the tech companies themselves. Veteran diplomats from the State Department, expecting promotions after Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Presidential election, were unceremoniously fired when Donald Trump won instead.
Trump’s victory was blamed on the free and open Internet. Capitalizing on EU partners’ fears that 2016’s Brexit vote would lead to Frexit in France, Grexit in Greece, and Italexit in Italy, these powerful diplomats took their influence across the Atlantic. There, they pressured European regulators to pass novel Internet censorship laws such as Germany’s 2017 NetzDG— knowing US tech companies would be forced to apply similar censorship measures at home to preserve continuity with their global markets.
A second EU-to-US censorship pipeline has already been established. Last week, both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heralded the new EU Digital Services Act as a tool for cracking down on “disinformation” (read: different opinions online).
Can Elon Musk truly take on a transatlantic flank attack? Deus Ex Muskina will need a deus ex machine himself to aid in the conflict ahead.
It's pretty clear that the author is saying that the leftists expected her to win but were surprised by the results. Hillary was so sure she would win that she never put the vote fraud machine into overdrive to save money for holograph of a breaking glass ceiling in election night
He posits what was expected, and failed.
Because the public wants social media to be free and because the social media companies need to make a buck it's all about the ads.
“But Russia” say the idiotic, deep state, lapdog Fearpers.
Musk should offer these commies a free ride to Mars. Half of them would probably take him up on it.
Social media is a part of the shadowy Deep State government.
She also went to west Virginia and in a campaign speech told those people she was gonna shut down all the coal mines in the state......that was a hell of a time to decide to tell the truth for a change......but I’m glad she did.
Yeah, haven’t you heard? Putin fixed it because he wanted a free Trump condo
I get it, and he, or better said both failed.
Derp State found out the hard way that low tech methods can’t steal a larger margin victory.
Deep State has been solving that problem with RCV and RCV-enabled voting machines.
That’s how they stole 2020.
If we don’t get rid of both, RCV and RCV-enabled voting machines, even if every voter is a legal voter, Deep State can still steal elections.
We need to continue to - as Peter Thiel says - “build the stack”. That is not only to continue to build free speech Tech companies like Gab, GETTR, Truth, Rumble/Locals, Substack and now Twitter post takeover, but we also need to continue to build out an entire ecosystem of companies for web hosting, domain registry, accountants, law firms, banks, etc to service these companies. We need to essentially build a parallel economy the Authoritarian Left cannot censor and cannot really pressure and destroy the way they first destroyed Parler then forced it to knuckle under.
If the Yurps want censorship, that is their issue in their countries. We don’t have to accept it any more than the rest of America has to accept ridiculous California regulations.
True, the ads are important. First we need to take a cue from the Daily Wire which started up its own now successful razor company after Harry’s dropped them for offending against trans testicle dogma.
Also, we can count on revenue from several more conservative leaning companies.
Meanwhile, we need to keep putting pressure on companies like Disney and others for going woke. Make sure they understand that they will pay a price for wokeness and for virtue signaling. As the free platforms audience continues to grow and as these companies lose money because those of us to the right of Karl Marx refuse to do business with them, it will finally dawn on some of them that Republicans buy sneakers too. They could have just asked Michael Jordan who was smart enough to figure that out 30 years ago but several of them have to learn the hard way.
The solution is right in front of us...
Get woke, Go broke...
Let’s help these so called corporations go broke.
Simple internet searches and a steadfast refusal to use or purchase their products actually work.
Don’t need alot of pomp and circumspice.
As one woke company says, just do it
If that sounds preposterous, just understand that his is exactly how Big Pharma made tens of billions of dollars selling COVID “vaccines” to people who never needed them.
There is only one way we can take this country back…. At this point.
The writer refuses to acknowledge that social media membership is grossly inflated by bot accounts. These fake numbers have been presented to advertisers as real and certified.
When Musk exposes these fake membership numbers, businesses by the thousands will sue for refunds of money spent on ads on social media forums. That will destroy both facebook and google.
quickly tapped out after Facebook lost $60 billion to an advertiser shakedown directed at the company for failing to censor hard enough. Such shakedowns are now a seasonal rite of passage for all social media companies.
take out the middleman. big tech is advertising. nothing more.
fill your cart with local/generic brands not the national brands.
dine at the locally owned storefront restaurant not the national chains.
national brand advertisers fund the corrupt media and tech.
stop funding them
Read somewhere on here this morning about twitter employees seriously freaking out because their DM’s will be available to Elon and his new employees. There is good reason for that...my take is that twitter DM’s were used as a communication mode by the grassroots activists scattered all over the country playing with the 2020 election.
DM’s can only be sent between people who “follow” each other...meaning it would be easy to expose the whole web of activists and their acts and intent will be there right in black and white.
Don’t be surprised if you eventually hear that there was a massive “server” problem or something that destroyed all DM histories.
They probably knew it and thought the management would ignore or even promote them for the leftist shenanigans.
I doubt any of those dipshts thought through the consequences of a company regime change.
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