Are Corporations Handling Censorship For Big Brother?
Today a large part of our lives takes place online. People use the internet for all sorts of things from socializing and connecting with people to making a living online. We've come to depend on it. The internet has become the modern day town square. It's where we all meet up together and where we set up our shops. The internet has made it possible for anyone to reach a worldwide audience with their product or message. It's an amazing tool but it has it's limits and those limits are tightening more each day.
If you're following the news lately you've heard that InfoWars host Alex Jones was banned across 4 major social media platforms. Essentially putting him in the dark as far as publicity and limited him to mostly just his website and Twitter who still hasn't joined the ban against Jones. This attempt at suppression of Jones has of course backfired. Jones has become more popular and talked about than ever. But Jones isn't the only one dealing with online suppression.
Independent journalists and video content creators have been dealing with online censorship for quite some time. With the war on "Fake News" we saw it really ramp up on Facebook and YouTube with channels and pages being taken down and all content erased. Instead of fake news sites what was really attacked was left and right wing independent media sites. Facebook's algorithms attack and suppress unwanted content and YouTube has become very heavy handed with content restrictions and bans. The real agenda of the war on fake news seems to be to squash out opposing voices to the official narrative of the mainstream media.
This increase in censorship is alarming and before you say Facebook and YouTube are private companies and they can do as they please. Thats all well and good but each of those companies happens to have a monopoly on their respective markets. The phone company cant cut you off because they don't like what you're saying. People depend on the internet as much or more than phones so maybe it's time for more regulation of social media. But that won't happen because social media giants play ball with the government to make sure it won't.
So unfortunately the one thing we can be sure of from all of this is that we can expect more censorship from private corporations against dissenting voices. Hopefully not to the point where those voices are silenced and all thats left is the mind numbing propaganda machine known as the American mainstream media. But that of course is up to us as the consumers. We need to support platforms that allow for freedom of expression and speech and stop supporting those that don't.
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