Censorship Clampdowns Redux + EU DSA Rollout
Censorship Clampdowns Redux + EU DSA Rollout
As things heat up all over the globe, and society careens into the pivotal election year, the pitched battle for the narrative takes shape.
The Israeli conflict has opened our eyes not only to the fragility of the establishment narrative, but to that of our freedom to speak on the most sensitive of issues. And it turns out, for the establishment, nothing is more sensitive than the topic surrounding Israel.
Establishment propaganda has backfired as “news networks” scramble to control the blowback for their paymasters. Governments worldwide are announcing major clamp downs from almost every imaginable angle—thoughtcrime is more real than ever as freedom of speech becomes a thing of the past.
The most nefarious of these is the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect this year, but still gives companies until January 2024 to fully comply, which means we likely won’t see the full brunt of its censorship for a few more months:
This is the totalitarian act which threatens to entirely take down Twitter in the EU. It forces all social media companies to comply in removing any “illegal” or hateful posts, which as we know corresponds to content that disagrees with the establishment narrative.
EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Elon Musk on Tuesday, October 10, that his platform X, formerly Twitter, is spreading "illegal content and disinformation", in a letter seen by AFP. The letter said concerns had heightened after the Hamas attack against Israel, and demanded Musk respond to the complaint within 24 hours and contact "relevant law enforcement authorities".
The irony is that the act—billed as the most ‘ambitious’ such legislation in history—is characterized by its creators as “protecting” free speech while being against “illegal or hateful content.” The first part is just deliberately deceptive fluff; the “illegal” and “hateful” content is exactly the free speech the act intends to curtail.
But it exposes just how undemocratic and totalitarian the EU as an institution really has become. Recall that the EU Commission is the completely unelected body which proposes new legislation in the EU. The “commissioners” are appointed by members of the EU Council, rather than by direct vote of any European citizenry.
However, once the DSA takes effect, it becomes absolute law in all EU member states. Think on that—a law is proposed by people who were never voted into place by any EU citizens, but now all EU citizens must comply. This is the definition of a totalitarian technocratic bureaucracy.
To be fair, the European Parliament of the EU body does vote on the final package, and the parliamentarians are “directly” elected by EU citizens. However, voter turnout for EU parliamentary elections are extremely low, sub-50%, compared to the global average of 66% voter turnout for national congressional and presidential elections, which means that citizens are simply not concerned with EU politics, and the EU bureaucracy therefore rules de facto by disinterest and disengagement rather than true democratic principle. That’s not to mention the fact that commissioners—though appointed by “elected” parliamentarians—can actually be removed at will by the EU Commission President who themselves are not elected.
In short: citizens of every EU state must have their online speech curtailed and strictly controlled because a bunch of unelected bureaucrats with no connection to their country told them so.
And is it any surprise that the specific Commissioner who actually proposed the DSA was Margrethe Vestager, who is a member of the Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission?
This is how the technocracy works. The secret meetings in groups like Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission are where the plans are initially hatched and plotted out. The most enthusiastic ‘foot soldiers’ are then chosen from amongst the votaries and the finance barons who control the money send down the orders to their corporate subsidiaries to push a given candidate into position. This is done simply by pumping enough money into various PR campaigns, greasing palms of corrupt officials, etc., to install that candidate into the appropriate office or position where they can pitch or facilitate the new program/initiative designed in the Trilateral convocation.
Just a week ago TikTok announced it had assigned a plethora of new staff to “combat disinformation” about Israel after the EU complained. The initiative has already taken down 500,000 videos and live streams for “violations.”
The EU’s commissioner for industry, Thierry Breton, predictably framed it as “protecting children and teenagers” from “terrorist propaganda.” Once again, we get that intentionally ambiguous terminology. Both “terrorist” and “propaganda” are subjective terms which mean “anything we disagree with” (propaganda) from “anyone we disagree with” (terrorist). Remember, to think the 2020 election was stolen is virtually now considered “terrorist propaganda” in the U.S., as the “right wing extremist” movement has now been classified as tantamount to a terrorist organization.
But this virus is spreading all over the globe, even beyond the pale of just the EU. For instance, though the UK is no longer in the EU, here’s a recent exchange on UK television between Jewish journalist Rachel Riley and the BBC regarding free speech:
“Of course people have a right to free speech, they don’t have a right to support terrorism, Hamas is a designated terrorist organisation in the UK” TV presenter Rachel Riley says Hamas are “incompatible” with the freedom of Palestinians
Of course, they have the right to freedom of speech she says—it’s only “hate speech” that no one has a right to. Her stuttering jive revealed another major logical flaw, as well: she claims Hamas is a designated terrorist group, yet Benjamin Netanyahu is on record instructing his government to continue financially supporting Hamas—this was literally reported by Israel’s own Haaretz:
So shouldn’t the same standard apply? That would mean, based on Rachel’s rationale, that Netanyahu is in fact promoting terrorism and should have his air-time on UK television completely suspended, no? Yet he’s given the spotlight 24/7 on Rachel’s own network—how is that?
But this gets to the crux of the argument. The establishment censors completely discredit and invalidate themselves by displaying clear hypocrisy, double standards, and contradictory decrees. They apply their confabulated “rule of law” as they see fit, but in the information age the entire world has become witness to the hypocrisy on a daily basis.
The problem is that the narrative controllers dictate all the rules and definitions, and they change them on the fly to suit their needs. In a new interview, presidential candidate Nikki Haley echoes the words of the British presenter above, saying that ‘our country has the freedom of speech not freedom of hate’. Yet the term “hate” is nothing more than a fake contrivance just like “terrorism”, meant for the specific purpose of being able to silence any opposition or critics.
Just by simply categorizing something in the ridiculously amorphous and arbitrary box of “hate” you get to conveniently strip a person of their constitutional rights. And hate just happens to be anything that disagrees with the establishment.
In fact Haley wants to go a step further, one of her campaign’s chief goals is to completely redefine “anti-semitism” to include anti-zionism:
Now anyone who goes against the Zionist cause is being disenfranchised, doxxed, and deplatformed in an unprecedented way and on an institutional scale. Not only have colleges like Harvard, below, been publicly doxing Palestine supporters, but the practice has been endorsed by figures like Haley and Ron Desantis:
Establishment voices are even now militating for getting highschoolers doxxed and kicked out:
A Berkeley law professor even wrote a letter outing and condemning his own pro-Palestinian students, asking future employers not to employ them:
One would think this is a major conflict of interests and betrayal of his unspoken duty and obligation to his students. After all, they’re paying the university top dollar with the understanding—promised to them both implicitly and sometimes explicitly at the outset—that they would be aided in obtaining careers. Of course the professor couches his unethical plea with the stigmatizing “anti-semitic” sobriquet, which, in the eyes of most brainwashed denizens, instantly makes it acceptable.
It’s incredible how people who so vehemently virtue signaled as freedom fighters and rights defenders during the Covid era are suddenly fine with disenfranchising Americans over their disagreement with Israel’s ongoing genocide.
The establishment hierarchy is now going to any length to keep their narrative going. While doxing, deplatforming, and silencing Americans who support Palestine, the pro-Israeli establishment is now throwing billions in cash at ad campaigns, propaganda, and even outright bribes to thousands of influencers to make them toe the line.
Many teen influencers all over the world have come forward with stories of how Israel tried to bribe them to become propaganda mouthpieces:
These flagrant oversteps have continued to expose the nature of the media-military-industrial-complex and the extent to which dark intelligence powers have covertly married with social media companies to, in effect, annex them as mere arms of the global intelligence apparatus.
I went into greater detail of the specific interconnections in this earlier article:
But suffice it to say, some of the troubling directions forecasted therein have only come to bear out since. For instance, revealed in the ‘Twitter files’ was the fact that former CIA agent Nada Bakos ‘secretly’ worked alongside the now-infamous Yoel Roth, head of Twitter’s ‘Trust and Safety’ team, while hiding the fact from her public Linkedin profile. Why would she need to work at Twitter in “dark” mode like this?
Twitter’s Yoel Roth, in the meantime, was having weekly meetings with the FBI to discuss which ‘dangerous’ narratives were cropping up that particular week and were in need of censorship. He dutifully followed their every guidance in squelching any voice that happened to challenge critical establishment narrative.
This is nothing more than the continuation of the Operation Mockingbird intelligence takeover of the press, but now encompasses social media as well.
But Elon Musk has been fighting back in interesting ways. Two weeks ago he ‘shocked’ the gate-keeping clerisy by removing the NYTimes official verification badge on X/Twitter, citing their wanton spread of false information on the Israeli conflict. For comparison purposes:
This has outraged legacy media outlets, which see it as a dangerous curb to their power and control over the minds of the populace. The Washington(Com)Post, for instance, writes:
The badge was the only symbol distinguishing the Times’ 55-million-follower account from impostors amid two major global conflicts in Israel and Ukraine. X has hosted and helped amplify a flood of false information related to the Israel-Gaza war, some of which Musk has personally endorsed.
The irony of the above complaint is that it’s the NYTimes themselves who have been downgraded for spreading a flood of false information, such as jumping to conclusions on the Gaza hospital strike which were quickly proven false.
But the Wapo article gets to the heart of the issue: the thought-police and hall-monitors who view themselves as sole ‘authorities’ are terrified that Musk’s move displaces them, in favor of what is essentially citizen journalism:
Musk has openly campaigned on Twitter about his goal of promoting citizen journalism over that of sclerotic legacy institutions. It’s precisely the topic I covered early on, writing how legacy media has become completely and utterly obsolete in the face of modern, direct reportage on events:
I encourage those who haven’t seen it to go read the article above, particularly in light of the recent developments. In essence, my thesis revolved around the fact that legacy media now regularly relies on second, third, and fourth-hand information to report on a given event, while citizen journalists bring direct, exclusive first hand reports straight from the epicenter itself.
How many times have you watched a plastic-looking talking head in a BBC/CNN/et al newsroom, situated thousands of miles away, monotoning their slanted “coverage” from a teleprompter? In the case of global conflicts, their coverage will always exclusively be from one side. For instance, you won’t see a Western MSM press correspondent ‘embedded’ somewhere on Russia’s side of the Donbass, or in Gaza for that matter, giving voice to the other side. They will always exclusively report from the ‘chosen perspective’.
Given that fact, why would anyone choose to get their information from such obsolete institutions? Platforms like X/Twitter allow you to receive updates not only directly but in an instantaneous, timely manner. Why would you rely on a pre-scheduled report at 8pm, where a talking head spools off what happened that morning when you could have gotten the direct on the ground scoop from a journalist citizen livestreaming events precisely as they happened?
And by the way—it’s hilarious that Wapo characterizes the elevation of citizen journalists over that of corrupt, inaccurate legacy media institutions as a “rightward turn.” What does the false dichotomy of the right-left have to do with privileging accurate, timely information over its opposite?
Here they bellyache that these independent news sources are now widely outperforming legacy news, in terms of reach and engagement:
Well, duh—that’s how it should be in a truly meritocratic system; information that’s both timely and accurate gets floated to the top, while information that panders or purveys lies gets rightfully penalized in the rankings.
The problem is—and many have noted this—is these rigid, obsolete institutions have enjoyed the luxury and privilege of being artificially boosted for so long, they simply don’t know what to do with themselves once they’re faced with an actual, fair, meritocratic, and democratic system.
Almost every “mainstream” outlet has been subsidized and artificially propped up for years. This is evidenced, for instance, by the fact that the top prestige names like CNN, NYTimes, et al, have tens of millions of followers on platforms like Twitter, yet get less engagement—in the form of likes, comments, retweets, etc.—than accounts with as little as a few thousand followers. And this is not some post-Elon Musk artificial throttling—it’s been that way even before.
This means that their tens of millions of followers were likely acquired in some artificial manner, whether they’re bots or part of some other account mass-scraping technique which boosts followers that aren’t particularly interested in your brand.
In short: it’s the same Leftist story over and over. The current crop of cultural Leftists—which includes various organizations and institutions—simply can’t abide the removal of their erstwhile artificially-propped-up status as cultural purveyors. It’s no different than when Brian Stelter and co. mewled on air about how the media’s “right” to control the narrative was being eroded, and how this is apparently a “dangerous” development. Dangerous to who? Only to the establishment which used the captured legacy media institutions as gatekeepers, hall monitors, and thought-police in one.
Also, it highlights the inability of Leftist culture purveyors to accept the paradigm of true competition. They have steeped themselves so deeply in the cult of ‘equity’ that they no longer understand how competition is supposed to work, and that in order to survive as a business you’re actually supposed to—gasp!—out perform your competitors.
In the era that introduced the concept of ‘too big to fail’ banks and financial institutions, we’re now seeing the outcry of obsolete media relics who consider themselves ‘too big to fail’ because they view their role in society as being sacrosanct and inviolable. The problem is, in that very admission lies the inadvertent acknowledgment that their institutions have grown into something dangerously different to what they are, ethically, supposed to be.
The crux lies in that very word itself: institution. Legacy media outlets have allowed themselves to grow from the independent and impartial organizations they were supposed to be into quasi-governmental institutions, akin to agencies of the government, which carry some sort of official ‘mandate’ which cannot be challenged or elided. Essentially: they now think of themselves as Information Ministries, like the Ministry of Truth from 1984.
So then how does it come as any surprise to them that actual verifiably independent and often impartial observers, solo frontline reporters, etc., now regularly outperform these crustaceous quasi-governmental agencies whose ‘reportage’ now has the character of being nothing more than ‘officially sanctioned narrative’?
The blurring of the lines between ‘trustworthy’ or ‘official’ institution and independent reporter has now become a veritable crisis for the establishment.
Paul Thacker’s recent report on this cracked open the hypocrisy of how censorial institutions themselves use independent or crowd-sourced info “researchers” as long as they receive an empty cachet from a university or some other institutional ‘authority’:
These institutions decry the rise of the lone wolf researcher/reporter yet secretly rely on them when it suits their agenda. For instance, the infamous Snopes outfit was outed as nothing more than a ‘basement blog’ run by a wife and husband team. Rather than credentialed researchers they were merely amateurs with zero experience, yet were used and widely cited by every major institution as some sort of ‘authority’ on disinformation.
So they can do it—but when it comes to an independent basement researcher generating content that’s outperforming these languishing legacy relics, it’s suddenly “dangerous”.
Facebook was even forced to admit their ‘fact checks’ were in fact—no pun intended—merely opinion:
Similarly Glenn Greenwald recently dissected an EU report about ‘pro-Russian propaganda’ on Musk’s X platform. When he dug in, Greenwald found that anything that happened to align with the Kremlin’s views is considered ‘pro-Russian propaganda’. So if you have no affiliation with Russia and don’t even support it in general, but happen to disagree with Ukraine’s conduct, you are considered a ‘pro-Russian propagandist’ according to the EU commissioner who accused Musk.
Last week Matt Taibbi fronted an initiative against what he calls the Censorship Industrial Complex, with the following declaration:
We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.
He gathered hundreds of notable signatories from every field, which you can see in his post above. They include figures like Slavoj Zizek, Jordan Peterson, Peter Hitchens, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, John Cleese, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and many others. Of course, the purveyors of this censorship likely couldn’t care less, and will continue doing everything necessary to protect The Narrative and The Agenda.
But they are paying a price. For example, days ago it was reported:
Google has lost $140B in value TODAY in midst of DOJ antitrust trial, another starting in a few weeks and two more expected next year. Makes me think they’re really foolish if they don’t find agreeable terms in Canada to help fund the news they leverage. And they’re not.
Tim Sweeney hits the point home:
A company can’t maintain an adversarial position against its entire ecosystem of participants forever and remain strong. And Google’s on the wrong side of everyone: against consumers with its surveillance, against developers with its taxes and paywalls, against the media…
And therein lies the crux of the situation. In order to fully control the tap of information, these entities must get increasingly adversarial toward their own customer base. A little here and there may not immediately ripple through the vast eco-system, but eventually, reorienting your institution’s entire operations toward adversarial postures means it’s only so long before something snaps.
Mega-corps like Google have violated and betrayed all mandates and obligations to their customer base. They have accumulated the power of nations, and in doing so appear to have followed the blueprint of the United States: dominate through fear, threat, and hostile sabotage. But in the end, they learn the same lesson the U.S. is currently absorbing on the global scene: it’s not long before you’ve alienated everyone and found yourself isolated, and eventually under attack.
The people are fighting back, and it turns out the ‘invincible’ mega-corps and institutional monoliths do actually cave once they face opposition. This week, for instance, the ADL was forced to take ‘Libs of TikTok’ owner Chaya Raichik off of their ‘Glossary of Extremism’ list after she threatened them with legal action:
Increasingly people are stepping up and fighting back against the endless censorship, suppression, and general terror tactics of the establishment. But unfortunately it’s going to get more difficult to do as the censorship regimes become institutionalized and burned-in into countries’ legal frameworks, as with the EU’s DSA. But that itself foments more opposition, which leads to even further tension and will likely come to a head, as societal breakdown accelerates.
For now the most important thing that remains is to continue challenging the false-constructs used as the cruxes of censorship against us. These are the disingenuous litanies of terms like “hate speech” or “anti-Semitism” as a surrogate for any conceivable criticism of Israel or its ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
As stated in the opening—and echoed in Taibbi’s declaration—we can’t allow them to gaslight us with the condescending avowal that they in fact “stand for free speech” just like us, but not “hate” speech. This happens to include the support of “terrorism”—which is any group arbitrarily designated as such. With the American “far right extremist” movement being increasingly designated as a ‘terrorist threat’, it’s only a matter of time before agreeing with any conservative opinion at all will be construed as illegal on account of promoting “terrorist ideas.”
All such artificial constructs must be challenged and done away with, as they are mostly arbitrary neologisms designed to manufacture accusations with the stamp of authority. Don’t give ground and explain why your condemnation or critique isn’t “hate speech”—rather, fight it at its root and refuse to even acknowledge it as a real term. By destroying the counterfeit constructs we disarm the social engineers of their most potent weapons.
Let that be a start.
Source: Dark Futura
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