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UPDATED: The Twitter account of Julian Assange’s mother was restored on Wednesday night after her supporters sent a flood of messages to Twitter.

Telesur English Hit By Same Restrictions

Christine Assange, the mother of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, had her Twitter account restored more than 24 hours after it was abruptly restricted by the social media company.

Hundreds of tweets were sent to the San Francisco-based company by supporters demanding that she regain access to her account.

Ms. Assange tweeted at 10:33 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday: “Back on deck! Many thanks to everyone contacting @Twitter on my behalf. Thanks to @Twitter for responding with a reconnect.”

Ms. Assange told Consortium News by phone that she has had no contact with Twitter and still does not know why her account was restricted and precisely why it was restored. She was unable to post new Tweets or read anyone else’s while the restriction was in place.

Outrage at the restriction was expressed by many Assange supporters in tweets to Twitter and its CEO, Jack Dorsey.

Another supporter wrote: “The only unusual activity is not seeing a mother fight for her child. It’s unnatural and cowardly to think that her tweets are unusual.”

On Thursday, @TelesurEnglish, the Venezuelan state broadcaster’s English service, was hit with the same restrictions by Twitter as had Ms. Assange, who tweeted a complaint about it:

Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control

March 20, 2019

Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control

Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no apparent reason.

The latest outrage is Twitter banning the account of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange’s mother, Christine.

Australian and New Zealand ISPs have gone bonkers IP blocking sites in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Sites like Zerohedge have been targeted in the past two weeks for publishing narratives orthogonal to what the governments in the West are comfortable with people consuming.

First it was Facebook, blocking and then unblocking Zerohedge with no apparent reasoning behind it. Now its ISP’s over-reacting to an emotional event ensuring that a good crisis never goes to waste.

And these ISPs are going much farther than just avoiding any potential legal liabilities. They are now openly calling for the platforms themselves — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — be regulated by governments to stop ‘dangerous information’ from reaching the eyeballs of consumers.

And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians underneath.

It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free. These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.

So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a large swath of people.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…?

It’s especially easy to do this after having whipped everyone up into two camps of highly polarized and radicalized camps across multiple political vectors.

Trump vs. Liberals in the U.S.

Remainers vs. Leavers in the U.K.

Open borders vs. Immigration control across the West

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Restricts Account of Julian Assange’s Mother

March 20, 2019

Twitter Restricts Account of Julian Assange’s Mother

The social media giant has given no reason to Christine Assange who had turned to Twitter to campaign for the liberty of her son.

The Twitter account of Christine Assange, the mother of the arbitrarily detained founder of WikiLeaks, has been restricted, she told Consortium News on Tuesday.

“My Twitter account has been ‘blocked due to ‘unusual activity,’” Ms. Assange wrote in a text message. Twitter, however, has provided her no reason for its action.

Ms. Assange is a prolific user of Twitter in her campaign to free her son who has been a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London since 2012.

Twitter has posted the following message on her page:

While a user can access her page by agreeing to view her profile, Ms. Assange told Consortium News she is unable to post new Tweets to her account.

Her last post, at 11:55 am on Tuesday in Australia, where she lives, is a retweet of an article published about her son. She posted 12 tweets in the past 24 hours. “Interesting that it followed on from a day of my tweets about free speech and calling on journalists globally to stand up for Julian,” Ms. Assange said in a text message.

Clinton and Bolton

In the past ten days, Ms. Assange tweeted direct replies to Hillary Clinton and John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser. Bolton had tweeted on March 9: “US military should use #Wikileaks for cyber warfare target practice. Take down their capabilities & prevent further harm to nat’l security.”

Ms. Assange’s reply to Bolton is no longer visible under his tweet. Nine replies to Bolton are now “unavailable.” Ms. Assange said in a text message that her reply began by calling Bolton’s tweet, “Fascist talk.”

Christine Assange with Ecuador chancellor Ricardo Patiño in Quito, July 30, 2012. (Flickr)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Admits Shadowbanning Lisa Page Tweet By Federalist Co-Founder “To Keep People Safe”

March 19, 2019

Twitter Admits Shadowbanning Lisa Page Tweet By Federalist Co-Founder “To Keep People Safe”

Twitter has admitted to shadowbanning a tweet by The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis in order to “keep people safe.”

Tweeting a passage last week from former FBI attorney Lisa Page’s Congressional testimony discussing the FBI’s rush to find connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, Davis pointed out the irony of Hillary Clinton’s campaign employing former UK spy Christopher Steele, a foreign national, “working with Russians to obtain damaging information about Donald Trump.”

Of note, the dossier Steele compiled which was subsequently used to obtain a warrant to spy on a Trump adviser (and later smear Trump) relied on a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin,” according to Vanity Fair.

Following his March 12 tweet, Davis wondered if Twitter was experimenting with “shadow bans” – as he could only see his tweet if he was logged in, meaning nobody else could see it.

✔

Is @Twitter experimenting with shadow bans by deleting tweets so others can’t see them, but keeping them visible to you while you’re logged in? I had to re-publish my original Lisa Page transcript tweet because it was disappeared to everyone but me.

Six days later, Twitter confirmed with Davis that they had deliberately shadow-banned his tweet in order to “keep people safe.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Social Media Companies “Struggle” to Help Censors Keep us in the Dark

March 18, 2019

Social Media Companies “Struggle” to Help Censors Keep us in the Dark

According to CNN Business, “Facebook, YouTube and Twitter struggle to deal with New Zealand shooting video.”

“Deal with” is code for “censor on demand by governments and activist organizations who oppose public access to information that hasn’t first been thoroughly vetted for conformity to their preferred narrative.”

Do you really need to see first-person video footage of an attacker murdering 49 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand?

Maybe not. Chances are pretty good you didn’t even want to. I suspect that many of us who did (I viewed what appeared to be a partial copy before YouTube deleted it) would rather we could un-see it.

But whether or not we watch it should be up to us, not those governments and activists. Social media companies should enable our choices, not suppress our choices at the censors’ every whim.

If Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had been primary news sources in 1915, would they have permitted us to view footage (rare, as film was in its early days) of New Zealanders’ desperate fight at Gallipoli?

How about the attack on Pearl Harbor?

The assassination of president John F. Kennedy?

The second plane hitting the World Trade Center.

Lucinda Creighton of the Counter Extremism Project complains to CNN that the big social media firms aren’t really “cooperating and acting in the best interest of citizens to remove this content.”

The CEP claims that it “counter[s] the narrative of extremists” and works to “reveal the extremist threat.” How does demanding that something be kept hidden “counter” or “reveal” it? How is it in “the best of interest of citizens” to only let those citizens see what Lucinda Creighton thinks they should be allowed to see?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Technology: Distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving & Deluding Ourselves to Death

January 28, 2019

TECHNOLOGY: DISTRACTING, DISTURBING, DECEIVING & DELUDING OURSELVES TO DEATH

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Using Twitter History To Arrest, Interrogate Dissidents

January 12, 2019

China Using Twitter History To Arrest, Interrogate Dissidents

China’s notorious crackdown on internet activity has resulted in the arrest, imprisonment and interrogation of people posting over Twitter, according to the New York Times.

A growing number of users who have been using the blocked platform through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been swept up in a sharp escalation of Beijing’s censorship effort, as authorities tighten their grip over Chinese citizens’ online lives. There are an estimated 3.2 million Twitter users in China – or around 0.4 percent of those who use the internet.

“If we give up Twitter, we are losing one of our last places to speak,” said human-rights activist Wang Aizhong, who said the police told him to delete messages critical of the Chinese government.

When he wouldn’t, 3,000 of his tweets mysteriously disappeared.

Mr. Wang refused to take down his tweets. Then, one night last month while he was reading a book, his phone buzzed with text messages from Twitter that contained backup codes to his account.

An hour later, he said, 3,000 of his tweets had been deleted. He blamed government-affiliated hackers, although those who were responsible and the methods they used could not be independently confirmed. –NYT

Wang’s experience is far from unique – as The Times reports that one Twitter user spent 15 days in a detention center, another person had their family threatened, and “a third was chained to a chair for eight hours of interrogation.”

Beijing’s war against internet freedom reveals its vision of internet control over the user of social media – while the CHinese government has stepped up their demands that Google and Facebook take down content deemed offensive despite the fact that both companies’ sites are blocked in China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

November 26, 2018

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

Those who have been saying that the West has turned Russia into a scapegoat to be blamed for each and every thing that goes wrong have been proved right. We have witnessed concocted stories invented to denigrate Moscow that have gone viral as directed by the secret services. The UK, the country that is spearheading the anti-Russian information campaign, offers a good example that illustrates how this is being done.

An online group of hackers known as Anonymous has just revealed covert UK activities in the EU. According to the documents released by that group, London is in the midst of a major program to interfere in the internal affairs of EU members, the US, and Canada. Anonymous threatens to release more information on the clandestine operations of the UK government, unless it agrees to remove the shroud of secrecy protecting those information-warfare efforts. On Nov. 24 Twitter deleted RT comments on the issue. The UK knows it has friends it can rely on in a crunch.

The Integrity Initiative is a London-based organization set up and funded by the government-friendly Institute for Statecraft, in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to wage information-warfare operations against Russia. Anonymous calls it a “large-scale information secret service.” It aims to “change attitudes in Russia itself” as well as the influence of Russian natives living abroad. The Integrity Initiative’s budget for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2019 is estimated at £1.96 million ($2.51 million). The network has received grants from NATO, the US State Department, and Facebook.

The Initiative’s operations have been kept under wraps. Its activities are conducted by “clusters” of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists, and academics involved in anti-Russian propaganda efforts. The list includes William Browder, a US-British businessman convicted in absentia in Russia for tax evasion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mad World

November 20, 2018

MAD WORLD

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad world, mad world

The haunting Gary Jules version of the Tears for Fears’ Mad World speaks to me in these tumultuous mad times. It must speak to many others, as the music video has been viewed over 132 million times. The melancholy video is shot from the top of an urban school building in a decaying decrepit bleak neighborhood with school children creating various figures on the concrete pavement below. The camera pans slowly to Gary Jules singing on the rooftop and captures the concrete jungle of non-descript architecture, identical office towers, gray cookie cutter apartment complexes, and a world devoid of joy and vibrancy.

The song was influenced by Arthur Janov’s theories in his book The Primal Scream. The chorus above about his “dreams of dying were the best he ever had” is representative of letting go of this mad world and being free of the monotony and release from the insanity of this world. Our ego fools us into thinking the madness of this world is actually normal. Day after day we live lives of quiet desperation. Despite all evidence our world is spinning out of control and the madness of the crowds is visible in financial markets, housing markets, politics, social justice, and social media, the level of normalcy bias among the populace has reached astounding levels, as we desperately try to convince ourselves everything will be alright. But it won’t.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fourth Turning & War of the Worlds

November 5, 2018

THE FOURTH TURNING & WAR OF THE WORLDS

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The paragraph above captures everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen during this Fourth Turning. It was written over two decades ago, but no one can deny its accuracy regarding our present situation. The spark was a financial crash. The response to the financial crash by the financial and governmental entities, along with their Deep State co-conspirators who created the financial collapse due to their greed and malfeasance, led to the incomprehensible election of Donald Trump, as the deplorables in flyover country evoked revenge upon the corrupt establishment.

The chain reaction of unyielding responses by the left and the right accelerates at a breakneck pace, with absolutely no possibility of compromise. A new emergency or winner take all battle seems to be occurring on a weekly basis, with the mid-term elections as the likely trigger for the next phase of this Fourth Turning.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Niall Ferguson: The Destructive Power of Social Networks

October 30, 2018

Niall Ferguson: The Destructive Power of Social Networks

The conventional wisdom promoted by the developers of social networks was that they would provide immense benefits to society through faster and broader connectivity. That view was shattered by Niall Ferguson, who called services like Facebook and Twitter “crazy ideas gone viral, with deeply negative implications.”

Ferguson is a historian and teaches at Stanford. His views are generally regarded as politically conservative and he has often taken positions that specifically oppose those of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He was the evening keynote speaker at the Schwab IMPACT conference yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Speaking from a historical perspectives, Ferguson said that human history has been dominated by the tension between social networks and hierarchies of all kinds. Indeed, that is the central theme of his most recent book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, which is available from the link on this page.

“The idea was that everything would be awesome if we are all connected,” Ferguson said, in regard not just to modern social networks, but to inventions such as the printing press.

“But that is a deeply suspect idea,” he said.

Giant social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, do not form an online social community. Instead, a large social network will “self-segregate” into opposing clusters, according to Ferguson. In the realm of politics, social networks have gravitated to become platforms for those with strongly held liberal and conservative views, with far fewer members offering centrist opinions.

A historical perspective

Ferguson said that the phenomenon of polarization was predictable, when one considers similar historical events.

To understand our time, he said, you must go back 500 years to the early 16th century, when the printing press became widely available. It allowed a greater volume of content to be produced and disseminated with a lower cost of communication.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Attack on Gab Proves Speech Was Never Free

October 29, 2018

Attack on Gab Proves Speech Was Never Free

“Who Runs Bartertown!?”
– Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

The First Amendment protects your right to say whatever you want free from government prosecution. It does not protect you from saying hateful things on private properties or privately-owned forums without fear of repercussion.

That is the very definition of freedom of association.

Friday’s attack by an unhinged, vile piece of human excrement on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh wasn’t hours old before real world agendas pushed to the top of the news.

Twitter alternative Gab was immediately dropped by PayPal without specific reasons.

Then immediately, Gab’s latest hosting service unilaterally gave the company a 48-hour termination notice of its contract.

This is the second time Gab has had to switch providers this year. They have been denied an app in the iOS store. Google will not allow their Android app to be in the Play Store.

Why is Gab targeted?

Because Gab is a true alternative to Twitter which exists outside of the control of the financial and political oligarchy.

With the recent passing of the EU’s “Link Law” which is designed to shut down opposition voices, the merged corporate/political oligarchy are moving to ensure that all speech is criminalized.

But to do that they first have to square the circle around that pesky First Amendment in the U.S.

And that means outsourcing the censorship to the companies who own the internet access points – the app platforms, the social media giants, the hosting firms and payment processors.

If you can’t build and maintain a business then you can’t oppose their rule.

With apologies to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “Free Speech isn’t Free… it costs a buck o’ five.”

This is classic barrier-to-entry stuff that the government engages in to protect the market share of the favored companies over their competition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now

October 27, 2018

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now

Just about the only bulwark against being silenced by the modern-day tech-corporate-NKVD-Stasi is Patreon.

If you do a search of shadow banning, you’ll find sites that claim to help you identify whether Twitter or Instagram has shadow banned your account. The basic idea of shadow banning is to spoof the shadow-banned user into believing their public posts are visible to all while in reality the posts are visible only to the user or in some cases to the users’ followers.

Wikipedia’s definition of shadow banning is:

“Shadow banning (also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting) is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.”

Here is whatis.com’s description: “Shadow banning is controversial because it allows an administrator or moderator to effectively become a censor and prevent specific users from interacting with other members of an online community on an equal basis.”

Shadow banning and outright banning are only the tip of the iceberg: everyone who posts content on the web or social media is subject to much more subtle and completely opaque controls on how much of your digital presence has been ghosted–not just in social media communities but in searches and how links to your site/content and re-posts of your content are handled by the tech cartel that controls what’s visible and “found” on the web and social media.

This cartel is dominated by Google and Facebook. Google controls over 90% of all search: what search results are displayed, the weight given to links (the page-rank assigned to websites) and a variety of other factors that can be depreciated, removed, omitted or blocked by algorithms and/or human censors (a.k.a. administrators) without recourse and without the site or user being informed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media ‘Just the Beginning,’ Warns Top Neocon Insider

October 26, 2018

Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media ‘Just the Beginning,’ Warns Top Neocon Insider

At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media, report Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.

This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.

Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”

In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the U.S. government and NATO. “They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Bans Former Asst. Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts

October 26, 2018

Twitter Bans Former Asst. Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts

Twitter has suspended noted anti-war commentator, economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts.

The suspension came without warning and was noted by journalist Caitlin Johnstone and others Thursday evening:

Twitter appears to have suspended Paul Craig Roberts @PaulCraigRobert,

a vocal antiwar conservative. Can’t find any info about it yet.

9:19 PM – Oct 25, 2018

View image on Twitter

Paul Craig Roberts has apparently had his Twitter account suspended.

The censorship grows and worsens.
(I recognize that I’m now probably next since I’m tweeting this.)

9:29 PM – Oct 25, 2018

View image on Twitter

Replying to @caitoz @PaulCraigRobert

Definitely suspended. Google links to @PaulCraigRoberts come up with this suspended notice.

10:17 PM – Oct 25, 2018

Roberts, 79, served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1982. He was formerly a distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. Roberts maintains an active blog.

He’s also vehemently against interventionary wars around the world, and spoke with Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news in a Tuesday article – in which Roberts said that President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty was a handout to the military-security complex.

The former Reagan administration official clarified that he does not think “that the military-security complex itself wants a war with Russia, but it does want an enemy that can be used to justify more spending.” He explained that the withdrawing from the INF Treaty “gives the military-security complex a justification for a larger budget and new money to spend: manufacturing the formerly banned missiles.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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