Who exactly gives Mark Zuckerberg the right to say what we can and cannot express online? Sure, clear cases of hate speech and incitement to violence should – by law – be removed and offenders brought to book, but we already have laws for that. It’s upsetting that Facebook can remove content it arbitrarily finds unpleasant or distasteful. But it is a private company; it’s Facebook’s platform and Facebook’s rules. But what’s really concerning – even worrying – is that governments appear to have a say in what and what can’t be shared on the site.
On the Reader-Censor
Thanks in large part to the way the internet and social media work we have been herded into tribes of opinion, rarely coming face-to-face – or “interfacing” – with people of radically differing opinions. Trends in the development of identity politics have perceptively homogenised our tribal opinions, making us less independent thinkers than subscribers to our chosen tribal groupthink. What this means is that people are increasingly finding themselves pressured into adopting a package of positions so as to conform to the expectations of the collective.
Twitter Will Not Tolerate Political Tweets
Britain is governed, as it always has been, by a political establishment comprised of wealthy and entitled men who see those beneath them – both women and men – as nothing more than meat for their sexual enjoyment. This list gives us an assortment of men in power, including the Foreign and Defence Secretaries, who are invariably “inappropriate” with female and male researches. We read of those who have paid to be filmed being urinated on, impregnating employees, pressuring their victims to have abortions, and generally behaving like drunken barnyard animals.
War on Terror means War on You
“Terrorism” is just the word powerful states, engaged in asymmetric wars, use to describe what happens when their victims hit back. Either this or, as the case has been in the most recent attacks in England, the government knows exactly where the terrorists are and what they are up to because it funded them and trained them.
Political Banking
This pattern of behaviour merely underlines the fact that banking and finance are instruments of government, or the possibility of something worse; that both the government and the banking apparatus are instruments of a bigger, more hidden agenda.
Self-Censorship in an Unjust World
Employers whose interests are those of government and the media have at their disposal the same access to information as their prospective employees. Individuals then are caught in the space between free expression and self-censorship.
Random Public Journal 