In Cyberspace No One Can Hear You Scream

The rising tide of online censorship drowns more alternative voices every week.

Photo by Joao Tzanno on Unsplash

The last two decades have been a golden age for the sharing of information and citizen journalism. Free speech being vital to a properly functioning democracy, advocates for truth and transparency jumped on the possibilities created by the internet to inform the public about what was really going on in the world. The ultimate symbol of this was Julian Assange of Wikileaks and it’s no accident that he was one of the first targeted by elites who wanted to put the Jack back in the box.

The political and social environment in the West had been shaped for decades by the Mainstream trio of the press, radio and TV.  During the post war consensus era, this gave us a flawed but not too shabby representation of what was really going on around the world. In the UK, World in Action brought us documentaries that genuinely challenged the powers that be, whilst massive circulation newspapers like the Mirror employed journalists of the calibre of John Pilger. We looked across at the Eastern Bloc with pity for the poor deluded citizens kept in the dark by the closed society. We enjoyed the jokes at Pravda and Izvestia’s expense - ‘There is no news in the truth and no truth in the news’. We admired those who tried to break through the walls of silence and propaganda through the use of Samizdat literature. It was one of the things that proved we were the good guys and they were the evil empire; why would you object to free speech if you had nothing to hide?

But then the Soviet Union fell and it was time to create a New World Order. Iraq quickly got a taste of things to come, then Yugoslavia, which was broken up and broken open to the forces of global capital. However, it wasn’t until the second crack at Iraq that we started to really notice the mainstream media’s surrender to the establishment, as it moved from watch dog to lap dog. The bell weather here was the abject surrender of the BBC in the face of Alistair Campbell’s onslaught when one of its journalists looked a little too closely into the construction of a fabricated case for war around the time of Dr David Kelly’s alleged suicide. The journalist, Andrew Gilligan, resigned after the Hutton enquiry stitch up, as did the chairman, Gavyn Davies and the Director General apologised for the BBC’s public service broadcasting. Ever since, the BBC has been in absolute lock step with its own government and by extension NATO on foreign affairs. Though the Guardian was never as much of a concern to the deep state as it liked to imagine itself, it took the paper a little longer to surrender fully. Their fall from grace came with the Snowden leaks, when they assisted the security services in totally destroying hard drives which had information revealing how much the West's spy agencies are actually spying on their own citizens. They now work in close partnership with said agencies, spend much of their time slating people that challenge the deep state, from Jeremy Corbyn to Julian Assange, and carry regular imaginative works of fiction by the likes of Luke ‘The Spook’ Harding. 

As the mainstream moved ever more blatantly under the control of the Atlanticist deep state, it needed to utilise fig leaves to make them look more edgy, draw the readers/viewers in and sheepdog them towards supposedly dissident but actually safe political positions. The likes of Paul Mason were used for this, but his pro NATO Trotskyism was rapidly torn to shreds and ridiculed by the emerging online alternatives being provided by the likes of the Grayzone. Billionaires like Pierre Omidyar set up new organisations like The Intercept to distract from and crowd out the real McCoy, but the likes of Glenn Greenwald soon got wise to it and called them out, blowing the gaff.

The deep state was losing control of the narrative. As it became evident that people aren't buying the mainstream anymore, they turned to creating their own online news sources and ‘citizen journalists’.  The likes of BBC media action set up social media organisations pushing western foreign policy in targeted countries, then used their reporting to bolster establishment foreign policy lines. Domestically, groups like Bellingcat suddenly came out of nowhere, spouting pro NATO lines wherever the West was stirring up trouble around the world. Here in the UK, the government set up propaganda units to regain control of the public's thought. The Institute for Statecraft, Integrity Initiative, the Disinformation Unit and the military wing, 77th Brigade, emerged like the heads of a propaganda Hydra.

Surely Parliament should be standing up for the people it represents and objecting to the use of taxpayers money to propagandise the population into following the will of the state? Not when the committees charged with scrutinising the relevant government departments are chaired by the likes of Tobias Ellwood (an officer in the 77th brigade), Tom Tugendhat (formerly an  officer in the intelligence corps) and Alicia Kearns (who formerly carried out a communications role at the MOD when its was meddling in Syria).

But people started following the money, unearthing where the funding was coming from and they lost their credibility. Another response was ‘fact checking’. Corporate and state funded fact checking organisations mushroomed, challenging the revelations coming from online dissident media. ‘Conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Putin talking points’ became the buzz phrases as people questioning the establishment line were targeted for smearing and discrediting. Sites like Wikipedia were policed to edit out of existence inconvenient truths. Just take a peek down the Philip Cross rabbit hole to get an idea. The deep state found that online journalism was turning into a game of whack a mole and they were losing their grip on the narrative. New methods were needed. Algorithms were manipulated to reduce the visibility of dissident views on both the right and the left. Truth seekers had to become ever more skilful in their use of internet searches to find alternative views. Dissidents lost followers on social media, found that the reactions to their posts suddenly dried up as their words disappeared into an internet void. This form of censorship was particularly effective. Because it didn’t just shut down voices, but merely muted them, arguments could be made that ‘Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.’ Like a man mumbling to himself unmolested in a gulag has freedom of speech. Not only this, but a lot of citizen journalist energy was expended on articles that were seen by barely anyone, unbeknownst to their authors, as a nominal audience that could be in the thousands dwindled to nothing through online manipulation.

If the subtle methods didn’t work, there were always alternatives. Lawfare was one. Julian Assange is only the most prominent victim of the iron fist within the velvet glove ready to crush those who are a bit too free with their speech in western democracy. Chelsea Manning, Barret Brown, John Kiriakou and others were imprisoned. Others, like Snowden, exiled themselves to avoid the same fate. In the UK, the legal system itself seems to have been manipulated to silence whistleblowers like Assange and their supporters like Craig Murray. Such stripping away of the protections of the rule of law had a chilling effect on those who wished to speak up, as was intended. 

However, not everyone critical of the deep state online can be accused of breaches of the Espionage Act (I know it's not a UK law but it is a US law so it applies to anyone Washington can get its hands on apparently). Not to worry, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Where the threat of imprisonment could not be used to silence opposition to the deep state, demonetisation could do the job. The deep state connected moguls of silicon valley held the purse strings for those financing their journalism online. The likes of paypal, Venma and GoFundMe rode to the rescue, freezing the accounts of those who were rocking the boat. The latter even tried to give away the money donated to the Freedom Convoy to charities of their own choice before it was pointed out to them that it's not a good look for capitalism to be so abusive of other people’s property. When it comes to money and free speech, it appears that the Geoge Carlin dictum applies; ‘It’s a big club and you aint in it.’ The internet is the Agora of modern democracy and those who own it want to decide what can be said there. If you think Elon Musk is going to champion free speech on Twitter, (OK, ‘X)’ think again. The Twitter files were a classic limited hangout (not that this detracts from the work of the brilliant Matt Taibi, who did at least give us an  insight into the close relationship between the platform and the deep state). Those people who think Musk is going to allow ‘X’ to be used as a tool to stick it to the mainstream media obviously missed him getting chummy with Rupert Murdoch at the Superbowl. It's a big club…

Manipulating algorithms, fitting people up, smearing them or just sapping their finances until they give up the candle are ways of shutting people up without blatantly censoring them but if needs must, we can do that too. The trick is to start with the contentious ones, ideally foreign or at the fringes of the left and right and then, once the precedent has been set, work your way through the rest along the lines of the boiling frogs principle. Get them used to it, then ‘you didn’t object to that one being banned, why not this one’ and so on. Kick them off broadcast media first by cooking up some pretext and getting a Quango like Ofcom to do the dirty work. That’s Press TV and Russia Today sorted. Then, once they are discredited there will be less resistance when they are subsequently kicked off the likes of Youtube or Facebook. Again, a precedent had been set, with InfoWars kicked off in 2018. This was a good primary target as many of those on the left who usually champion free speech were not going to speak up for someone they regarded (with some justification) as a nutter. Wiser heads realised the dam was breached but they were in a small minority. Within a couple of years all sorts of justifications were being used for deplatforming all sorts of content, all in the name of protecting the public from ‘Russian disinformation’ or ‘anti-vaxxer propaganda.’ Anyone, left or right, who found themselves outside the permitted discourse of the establishment mainstream could find themselves silenced. It is time for all dissidents, whatever their political persuasion, to come together to defend a genuine marketplace of ideas, because the window is closing, and closing fast. As far as the establishment is concerned, playtime is over.

To Paraphrase Niemoller;

First they came for Alex Jones 

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a right wing loon…

Who’s up for some Samizdat?