Seceding From State-Tech

Silicon Valley companies; Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc...; have openly become propaganda ministries on behalf of the American corporatist-establishment

Social Media Addiction. Source.

After spending four years allowing unfounded claims that the 2016 election was “stolen,” “illegitimate,” or “hacked” by Russia to run rampant across their platforms, Silicon Valley tech companies are now posturing as the defenders of the sanctity of elections in America by censoring any claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” as President Trump and his supporters claim. Yet they, as much as anyone, helped “rig” the election against Trump by suppressing, along with the corporate media, a legitimate news article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s financial dealings in China in the fourth-largest newspaper in America, the New York Post, on their platforms. Twitter even went so far as to ban the Post’s account for weeks after the initial article was published.

Google’s YouTube announced last week that “Supporting the 2020 U.S. election” means that they must purge any content on their platform that questions the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. However in some cases, that has meant allowing controversial views on the outcome or process of counting votes of a current election as election officials have worked to finalize counts. 

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.

Rest assured, sweet Summer children, that your betters at Google will still allow you to claim that the 2016 election was stolen by Vladimir Putin to install his puppet in the White House, however, and Hillary Clinton will never be called a threat to American democracy for calling Trump an illegitimate president.

And Facebook-owned Instagram recently “fact-checked” the claim that the 1994 crime-bill, championed at the time by Joe Biden in the U.S. Senate, led to mass-incarceration of African-Americans as false. Glenn Greenwald writes:

While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House — one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign — Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”

As first noted on Monday by former Sanders campaign organizer Ben Mora, Instagram publicly denounced as “False” a post on Sunday by the left-wing artist and frequent Biden critic Brad Troemel, who has more than 107,000 followers on that platform. Troemel’s post said nothing more than what Biden’s chosen running mate, Kamala Harris, has herself said, as well as numerous mainstream media outlets and countless criminal justice reform advocates have long maintained.

Greenwald goes on to detail exactly why Instagram’s tagging of this post as “false” is itself false by pointing out the arguments from members of Biden’s own political party, including his own future vice president, Kamala Harris, and even other establishment media organizations that have backed up the claim that Instagram, relying on a USA Today “fact-check,” declared to be outright “false.”

These companies, in short, are shilling for a particular set of politicians and political ideas while censoring competing views no matter how reputable or mainstream they might be if it harms one of their chosen champions in a particular moment.

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The cynical and hypocritical exploitation of democratic sentiment is merely there to mask the agenda-driven suppression of viewpoints that harm the interests of the corporatist-establishment in the Democratic and Republican parties, the Deep State, the media, and Silicon Valley. They are trying to manipulate our political viewpoints in their favor the same way they manipulate human psychology to keep us engaged with their platforms so that they can monetize our online behavior and enrich themselves.

The latter is a threat to our mental health, especially that of young people, and the former is a threat to our individual liberty. Here’s Matt Taibbi on why we don’t want to rely only on the “official” sources to determine what’s true.

There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level. The people who created the American free press understood this, even knowing the tendency of newspapers to be idiotic and full of lies. They weighed that against the larger potential evil of a despotic government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson called a “standing army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without any regard for truth.”

We allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in silly religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone establishing one officially mandated silly religion. With the press, we put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those things are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an aristocratic political establishment having a monopoly on those abuses [Emphasis mine]. By allowing some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s exactly the system we’re building.

The migration away from big tech companies has already begun, with many people trying to establish a following on alternative social media sites like MeWe, Parler, and Locals to name a few. I have accounts on several alternative social media platforms, but I’m not active on any of them as of yet. I don’t know which, if any, I might find myself participating on in the future; right now I’m feeling very anti-social media in general, and quite like the idea of this Substack blog being my only online presence; but I’m getting to the point where I’m certainly done allowing billion dollar companies to monetize my data for their further enrichment only for them to turn around and police the content that I’m allowed to see and interact with.

Facebook and Instagram, but I repeat myself, are probably the worst offenders and will likely be the first to go for me. I will not be deactivating my accounts, but doing a full-on deletion and doing everything in my power to block them from tracking me across the web. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Privacy Badger” browser add-on is one way to help stop these companies from tracking you across the web, so long as you’re not directly visiting their websites. Certainly imperfect, but paired with ad-blocking software, a VPN, and a more secure web browser, such as Brave, you’ll have a far more secure experience on the Internet.

Some of the others, like Twitter or YouTube, will be more difficult for me personally to give up, but it’s something that I’ve needed to do for a long time now. It is unconscionable for us to continue giving these people as much power over our lives as we do, in my opinion. They’ve allowed themselves to become subservient to the establishment elements within the federal government and now use their influence to create unnecessary and overblown division among average people and to censor unapproved dissent to help consolidate more power over us.

The best way to counter their influence is to simply stop using these services en masse and watch as these companies lose ever more market share. As I said before, that process has already begun, but it’s more important now than ever to make the case against these corporatist nightmares.