ISSUE #102: Silicon Valley sleeps in bed with the government agencies.
Oligarch Mark Zuckerberg made his first appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience this week, discussing how Facebook and the FBI teamed up to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story algorithmically.
“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.
“Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert.”
“There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
Unlike Twitter, which outright banned the Hunter Biden laptop story, Facebook took a subtler approach to censor the information that their masters told them to.
“We weren’t, sort of, as black and white about it as Twitter,” Zuckerberg said.
“We just kind of thought, Hey look, if the FBI, which, you know, I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement. They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something. Then I wanna take that seriously,” Zuckerberg said.
Censorship by the algorithm is becoming a preferred method of censorship for the Silicon Valley giants because it doesn’t create as much outrage from the public as the outright ban or de-platforming. The way it works is that any news story that threatens the status quo or challenges the mainstream narrative in any way gets its distribution decreased by the algorithm; meaning it’s less likely to be seen by more people and therefore, “go viral.”
Journalist Jonathan Cook discussed his experience with this kind of censorship:
"I won’t be banned," he said.
"I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice."
People seldom criticize this kind of censorship because it gives them the feeling that they can still share the article/video, but what we need to understand is that we are less likely to share a story that’s less likely to appear on our feeds. How do you share something that you don’t even know of?
Silicon Valley has figured out that de-platforming the dissident is more likely to make him more popular, so why not make his content appear on as few screens as possible?
Nothing in the Hunter Biden laptop story was as worrisome as the fact that the media, government agencies, and Silicon Valley work together to control the mainstream narrative among the public. Later, it turned out that Hunter Biden laptop story was not a Russian propaganda but the truth that was kept hidden from the public to diminish its influence on the upcoming elections.
This is just one example. We don’t know how many times the oligarchs and the government agencies officials teamed up in the past. We don’t know how many times they are going to repeat this in the future. We don’t know how many other important issues that everyone needs to be aware of are currently censored in this way.
Thanks to government and corporate secrecy, we only know what they tell us about their behavior and practices. We only know how much they are willing to tell us. You can brag about the freedom of choice people have in so-called democracies, but it’s not freedom of choice when people are propagandized into choosing one option over the another. Freedom of choice is possible only when we have the free flow of information, which is not possible as long as the flow of information is in the hands of a few oligarchs who interests are not aligned with the working class.
Not many people know this but there has been a trend of recruiting veterans of CIA, FBI, NSA, and other government agencies into the social media giants. This trend has been brilliantly noted and written by Alan MacLeod in a series of articles.
These government agencies have mastered the art of manipulating people and their ex-officials are now working at the social media giants. You definitely don’t need to be suspicious of this.
For the Westerns, a billionaire having more political influence than the elected officials is called democracy. Just like unicorns, democracy is an illusion.
How is the government agencies and social media platforms coming together to censor political information different from the government doing this task alone? It’s not different in any way or form. Then why do the Westerners think their kind of censorship is better than the censorship in the US-targeted nations like Russia, China or Iran?
We must not forget that these social media giants as we know them today would not exist if they were not willing to work with the government agencies to advance the empire agendas. Facebook exists because its policies align with that of the US empire perfectly. There would be no Mark Zuckerberg if he did the opposite of what he is doing now; if he preferred the free flow of information over the censorship of politically sensitive information.
They have no compassion for us. They don’t care whether or not we know the truth about anything. All they care about is the money and power they have, but more than that they care about their propaganda machine that convinces people that they don’t care about money or power.
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