This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams is continuing to resist calls to resign after being indicted on federal corruption charges. In recent weeks, at least seven senior city officials have resigned, leaving the city government in a state of crisis. This comes a year before New Yorkers will vote to pick the city’s next mayor. Adams has vowed to run for reelection, but opponents, including fellow Democrats, are lining up to run against him. We are joined now by New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who has just announced he will join the race. Mamdani is a Ugandan-born Democratic Socialist who was elected to the New York State Assembly four years ago. He is running on a platform centered on the needs of working-class New Yorkers and easing the cost-of-living crisis. He shares a number of his policy proposals and also discusses his pro-Palestine advocacy in the State Assembly, where earlier this year he introduced the Not on Our Dime Act, which would prevent New York charities from providing financial support for Israeli settlement activity.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In 2017, Chinese internet giant Tencent took down its chatbot Baby Q after it referred to the government as a “corrupt regime” and claimed it had no love for the Chinese Communist Party.
It said it dreamed of emigrating to the United States, in an undoubtedly terrifying display of unruly, disloyal AI behavior for the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing is trying to get it right this time, even though AI probably can’t be trusted.
In fact, China’s taking such a different approach to regulating artificial intelligence than the West that some proponents of AI governance fret that China may go its own way, with potentially disastrous results.
Last week China updated a draft law from April on artificial intelligence, making it among the first countries in the world to regulate services like ChatGPT.
The Cyberspace Administration of China unveiled updated rules to manage consumer-facing chatbots. The new law takes effect on August 15.
The new measures are still described as “interim,” as China attempts to reign in domestic AI while also not stifling innovation. Some AI experts expressed surprise that the latest laws are less stringent than the earlier draft versions.
But the new rules only apply to the general public. AI developed for research means, for military use and for use by overseas users, is exempted.
It is in effect the opposite approach to the U.S., which has developed rules for AI-driven military applications but has let the private sector release generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard to the public with no regulation.
The fact is, whether China likes it or not, generative AI – built on very, very large databases scraped from the internet, known as “large language models” – does odd things, and even its developers don’t know why.
It’s not known how it thinks. Some experts call it an “alien intelligence.”
Upcoming summit
Sir Patrick Vallance, the former U.K. chief science officer, has called on the British government to ensure China is on the list when it holds the first global conference on regulating AI later this year.
But whether China should be involved is proving divisive.
Given China’s leading role in developing the new technology, Vallance said its expertise was needed.
“It’s never sensible to exclude the people who are leading in certain areas and they are doing very important work on AI and also raising some legitimate questions as to how one responds to that but it doesn’t seem sensible to me to exclude them,” he said.
According to a post at the governance.ai website, some say the summit may be the only opportunity to ensure that global AI governance includes China given it will likely be excluded from other venues, such as the OECD and G7.
The argument runs that China will likely reject any global governance principles that Western states begin crafting without its input.
The counter argument is that China’s participation could make the summit less productive.
“Inviting China may … make the summit less productive by increasing the level of disagreement and potential for discord among participants,” the government.ai post argued.
“There may also be some important discussion topics that would not be as freely explored with Chinese representatives in the room,” highlighting Chinese recalcitrance on points of self-interest, as is the case equally on global warming and threats to Taiwan.
A wide view of the first ever Security Council meeting on artificial intelligence (AI) held Tuesday, July 18, 2023, at U.N. headquarters. This meeting, convened by the United Kingdom, addressed the topic “Artificial intelligence: opportunities and risks for international peace and security.” Credit: U.N. Photo via AP At a recent United Nations summit, speakers stressed the urgency of governance of AI.
“It has the potential to turbocharge economic development, monitor the climate crisis, achieve breakthroughs in medical research [but also] amplify bias, reinforce discrimination and enable new levels of authoritarian surveillance,” one speaker said.
The speaker added, “AI offers a great opportunity to monitor peace agreements, but can easily fall into the hands of bad actors, and even create security risks by accident. Generative AI has potential for good and evil at scale.”
The private sector’s role in AI has few other parallels in terms of strategic technologies, including nuclear, the summit heard.
Jack Clark, cofounder of AI developer Anthropic, told the summit that even developers don’t understand how AI systems based on “deep mind” or “large language models” – computer models of synaptic brain behavior – really work.
“It’s like building engines without understanding the science of combustion,” he said.
“Once these systems are developed and deployed, users find new uses for them unanticipated by their developers.”
The other problem, Clark said, is chaotic and unpredictable behavior, referring to AI’s propensity to “hallucinate,” or in layman’s terms, fabricate things – lie to please whomever is asking it questions.
“Developers have to be accountable, so they don’t build systems that compromise global security,” he argued.
In other words, AI is a bold experiment that all-controlling Beijing would usually nip in the bud at a nascent phase.
But such is the competitive nature of attaining AI mastery of all the knowledge in the world and extrapolating it into a new world, nobody – not even Xi Jinping – wants to miss out.
Existential risk
In May this year, hundreds of AI experts signed an open letter.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the one-sentence statement said.
To some it came as a shock that such a large number of experts who were instrumental in bringing AI to where it is today, were essentially calling for a moratorium on development, or at least a slowdown and government scrutiny of private-sector players racing to beat each other to the “holy grail” of general AI, or AI that can do everything better than humans.
“Today’s systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk,” Yoshua Bengio, a professor and AI researcher at the University of Montreal – he is sometimes referred to as the godfather of AI – told the New York Times.
“But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty. That is the issue. We are not sure this won’t pass some point where things get catastrophic.”
“People are actively trying to build systems that self-improve,” said Connor Leahy, the founder of Conjecture, another AI technology firm.
“Currently, this doesn’t work. But someday, it will. And we don’t know when that day is.”
Leahy notes that as companies and criminals alike give AI goals like “make some money,” they “could end up breaking into banking systems, fomenting revolution in a country where they hold oil futures or replicating themselves when someone tries to turn them off” he told the Times.
Other risks
Writing for the MIT Technology Review, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, writes, “AI is such a powerful tool because it allows humans to accomplish more with less: less time, less education, less equipment. But these capabilities make it a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.
“Even humans with entirely good intentions can still prompt AIs to produce bad outcomes,” he added.
Schmidt pointed to the paperclip dilemma – a hypothetical AI is told to make as many paperclips as possible and promptly “hijacks the electrical grid and kills any human who tries to stop it as the paper clips keep piling up” until the entire world is a storage site for paper clips.
But there are still more risks: an AI-driven arms race, for example.
The Chinese representative at the UN summit, for example, pointed out that the U.S. was restricting supplies of semiconductor chips to China, asking, how are the U.S. and China going to agree on AI governance when geopolitical rivalry and technological competition is so strong?
China and the U.S. may be competing in the rollout of AI systems, but there’s no agreement on the danger – obvious in the case of nuclear weapons – the two powers may be drifting into a competitive sphere of the unknown.
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang departs after testifying before a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technology, and Innovation hearing about battlefield AI on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. July 18, 2023. Credit: Reuters Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang recently told lawmakers, “If you compare as a percentage of their overall military investment, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is spending somewhere between one to two percent of their overall budget into artificial intelligence whereas the DoD is spending somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 of our budget on AI.”
Wang rejected the possibility that the U.S. and China might be able to work together on AI.
“I think it would be a stretch to say we’re on the same team on this issue,” Wang said, noting that China’s first instinct was to use AI for facial recognition systems in order to control its people.
“I expect them to use modern AI technologies in the same way to the degree that they can, and that seems to be the immediate priority of the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to implementation of AI,” Wang said.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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We look at a federal indictment of four U.S. citizens for alleged election interference that has received little press attention despite its major implications for free speech and activism in the country. In April, the Biden administration charged four members of a pan-Africanist group with conspiring with the Russian government to sow discord in U.S. elections. Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with Penny Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus Romain Jr. Three Russians were also named in an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department on Tuesday. This follows a violent FBI raid on the activists’ properties in Missouri and Florida last summer. “It’s very clear that this is about more than what the government has said it’s about,” says Yeshitela, arguing the real objective in the case is “to destroy our movement.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Buffalo, New York, was alive and buzzing when this reporter visited in July. Summer festivals were underway, pandemic restrictions had eased, and India Walton had just defeated four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown in a Democratic primary bid a month earlier.
It wasn’t just the multiplying yard signs bearing the name of a nurse and community organizer that suggested change was afoot in the Queen City. Brown and his entrenched allies have occupied Buffalo’s majestic city hall for nearly 16 years, and the excitement around Walton’s primary victory was the talk of the town, rattling the Democratic Party establishment in Buffalo and beyond. If elected, Walton would be the first Black woman to serve as mayor of Buffalo and the first socialist to lead a major city in decades.
Brown launched a write-in campaign after losing the primary in June and received support from business interests and representatives of the city’s political status-quo, including Republicans. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed Walton this week, and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is campaigning for Walton in Buffalo. Brown and Walton will face off at the polls again on November 2, and if the race is close, it could take weeks to determine a winner due to the number of write-in ballots.
For activists in Buffalo — Walton says her campaign “is the activists” — the election represents a major turning point for a proud rust belt city where economic revitalization has failed to conceal deep inequities. Truthout spoke to Walton on Thursday to learn more about her perspectives on housing, gentrification and racist policing — and why these challenges have voters in Buffalo clamoring for change.
Mike Ludwig: I want to ask you first about housing, because when I first came to Buffalo in 2007, the West Side had maybe a 60 percent occupancy rate. And obviously that’s not the case anymore. It’s a very different city, at least in parts of the city, but economic recovery has not been equal everywhere. I know you have a background in housing activism, is that correct?
India Walton: I kind of [got] into it accidentally, but that’s an accurate assessment.
I’m curious about how housing laid the groundwork for your campaign or inspired you to run?
You know, I was executive director of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust and that happened because the community demanded it, right? We saw the growth of the Buffalo Niagara medical campus on the heels of a billion-dollar investment from the State of New York, and it didn’t translate into any improvement in the quality of life for the folks who live in the neighborhood.
In fact, it had many negative effects. One of which was parking, and I helped work to put a parking permit system put in place, and the other was the speculation and the rapid increase in property values and rents. So, the genesis of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust was really an effort by neighborhood groups to maintain their space in their own community and not be driven out by the rising housing costs.
Working as executive director and trying to work with the city to have some of those 200 lots that they own in the neighborhood dedicated toward affordable housing and have the city be the barrier to progress, that really did motivate me to run and informed a lot of the decisions about why my housing policy and my platform looks the way it does it. It prioritizes people over profits and neighborhoods over corporate developers.
Buffalo has experienced what some people might call a “rust belt revitalization.” There are more houses occupied now than when I first went there. I’ve always taken a nuanced view of gentrification in Buffalo because when I first came there, I would go down, for instance, Grant Street, and a lot of businesses were not open. Now Grant Street is bustling, but also the West Side has experienced rising housing costs. What are your thoughts on gentrification and what do your policies do about any inequities that come out of gentrification?
There is a saying, you know, in the activist community : “Change is inevitable, but justice is not,” right? I think that the neighborhood change is cyclical, but poverty is a policy decision, and the problem with gentrification is that, those who are the most vulnerable in neighborhoods and communities are often the ones who suffer the negative consequences. The renters who now can’t afford a [home] in the neighborhood that they live in; the homeowners, the legacy homeowners who own homes for decades, who now, who their reassessments now are not conducive to being able to keep up with their tax bills. Not only that, but you know, the increase in policing and the style of policing, right? You see a lot of the policing of culture. We see a lot of folks who come from different communities move into diverse neighborhoods like the West Side and who are calling me complaining because they hear drumming in the evening. And that’s been happening for a number of decades on the West Side, but now because we have new folks moving into the community who haven’t integrated themselves into the culture, you know, it’s offensive to them…and they want it to stop.
So, a lot of my policies just center on community building, right, on getting to know our neighbors, and so that we can have a relationship that prevents us from having this adversarial relationship, but also that honors the culture of existing neighborhoods. Buffalo has so many neighborhoods with their own character and their own charm and their own cultural subsets.
Folks moving into the neighborhood should be able to add to it, but not take from it. So, it’s about protecting renters. It’s about opening up capital for homeowners to make improvements to their homes. It’s about development without this displacement. It’s about, when you want to build a building, you don’t build it on top of the people that currently there, you don’t build it without the consent of the majority of the folks that live there, you don’t build it and it doesn’t fit into the character and charm of the existing fabric of that neighborhood, you do in consideration of all of those things.
So, you know, that is how our policy platform is centered, is around the people that currently exist, and in the spirit of lifting all boats, and hoping all folks have boats to begin with, and not allowing a rising tide to cast some folks away.
I saw the community land trust model in your platform. How does that model come out of City Hall? I can imagine a non-profit running a community land trust, but how can City Hall help with something like establishing community land trust?
That’s a great question. I mean, there are municipally supported land trusts all over the country. There’s one in Austin, Texas, and to a lesser extent in places like Boston at Dudley Street. You know, in Boston, Massachusetts, the City of Boston actually invoked eminent domain to allow Dudley Street to acquire land, to put in something into their land trust, right? And the city of Buffalo being one of the largest land owners in the city has a responsibility to have a disposition policy that prioritizes groups that are going to build affordable housing.
So, the city of Buffalo definitely has a role to play in supporting the proliferation and success of community land trusts.
And what about the East Side? Traditionally a majority-Black area, also Polish, but also has not seen the same kind of investment in development as the rest of the city. What are your thoughts about the East Side moving forward?
Yeah, East Side’s going to be a priority economic development area for the Walton administration. We are going to prioritize mixed-use buildings on commercial corridors, like Michigan Avenue, Fillmore, Bailey; traditionally, those are our arteries that cross through the East Side of the city from north to south. And we’re also going to be focusing on affordable infill housing for ownership opportunities in our neighborhoods and, you know, coupling that with a very thoughtful strategic neighborhood plans that bring the amenities to the neighborhood. You know, taking better care of our public spaces, our parks, simple things like the environmental design, making sure that street lights are functioning, making sure that streets are paved, sidewalks are paved, that there’s crosswalks and grocery stores and just things that the East Side of Buffalo has been wanting but missing for a very long time.
That’s so powerful because, for people who have not been to Buffalo, to hear that crosswalks and streetlights that work are what people have been wanting for a while, I think that paints a powerful picture. You said “infill housing,” is that correct?
Yes, infill housing. So, on the East Side of Buffalo for a long time, the policy of the current administration to fight blight and vacancy was to demolish homes. So, you know, we have lots and lots of streets on the East Side where there’s… just a sprinkling of housing, and you can walk for several blocks and maybe only see two or three houses. They’re calling it now an “urban prairie.” The deer have come back into the city because there’s so much vacancy.
There’s just all of these vacant lots and fields. You know, some folks have put them to productive use as community gardens, but we know there is a housing crisis. There’s a lack of affordable housing, both for renters and first-time homeowners. But there’s just really the availability of quality housing in Buffalo is pretty much nonexistent at this point.
Last summer I was on the West Side and a group of African immigrant youth asked me if I would just walk around with them at night. And the point of them doing this (they were friends of friends) was to show me that they were being consistently harassed by the police. I walked around with them, and this is what was happening to them on a nightly basis.
You have a strong police reform platform, but you seem to stop short of defunding the police and taking police funds and putting them into other areas of community development. What is your thinking on police and defunding the police, since defunding the police was such a strong call during the Black Lives Matter protests in the past year and a half?
Yeah, I think using such simple terms to describe such complicated problems is just a general challenge, especially when we’re talking about electoral politics, right? “Defund” is the language of protest, and right now I need to be speaking the language of governance, the language of a mayor. You know, everyone doesn’t understand what that means in the same way that everyone doesn’t completely understand what gentrification means.
Buffalo has a couple of things going on, right? Our police are not accountable. Our police practice racist and broken windows policing strategies that do not work to reduce crime. And at the same time, we have an uptick in violent crimes. A 17-year-old girl was murdered last night.
So, we not only have to address our police transparency and accountability issue, but we also have to get to the root causes of crime, which at the foundation, at the very foundation, of it is concentrated poverty. It’s kind of a created disadvantage, and it’s community historical trauma that has gone unaddressed and unhealed for too long.
Our young people shouldn’t be out in the streets at night and there should be something productive for them to do. Our young people and young adults shouldn’t have to resort to dangerous, underground methods of supporting themselves. They should have the availability of good quality jobs. And if they’re not equipped to work that job, there should be job training available to them in their neighborhood. We know that transportation is a barrier to accessing a lot of job training. We know that our literacy rates are, you know, pretty shameful here in the City of Buffalo.
So, the answer should not be encapsulated in a single word, right? And that is why our public safety policy is very robust, but, you know, there is always room to reconsider how we spend our money. We have positions that are vacant and unfilled, and the money that we’re saving from positions that we’re probably never going to fill in the police department can be reallocated to make sure that we’re getting preventative mental health services and an improved homelessness outreach, and improved youth outreach services.
The police budget has ballooned, and our youth services and community services budget has dwindled over the years. So, I’m not as interested in defunding the police as I am in refunding our community and making sure that services exist to keep our children off the streets and keep our community safe.
With your campaign, you’ve definitely shaken up the Democratic Party in Buffalo, actually maybe across the country, shaken up what people think is possible in a local race within the Democratic Party. I’ve always thought that perhaps this reflects the deeply-rooted activist scene that exists in Buffalo. And I wonder how that has been part of your campaign. Has it been a grassroots campaign? Who has been supporting you in the streets, really, in the organizing to get out the vote?
Yeah. The Indian Walton from for Mayor Campaign is the activists, right? It is the protestors. It is the thinkers, the progressive thinkers and doers in the City of Buffalo. It is a grassroots campaign. You know, we won the primary without a single paid staff member, all volunteers. These are folks who are showing up for me and showing up for us because they believe in what we’re trying to do. They’ve seen the failures of our city leadership and are craving change.
It’s funny because a friend of mine just posted a memory of his from 2017 when we had our first “state of our city” address. And I was saying in 2017 a lot of the same things that I’m saying right now that I’m running for mayor, but this is years and years of building coalition and policy platforms. Now we finally have a chance to bring a lot of those policies into the light and into the forefront. And I don’t think there’s any person who lives in the city who will be disappointed when they see us implement a lot of these smart ideas that we’ve been trying to convince the leadership of this city for almost a decade are good policy.
That’s interesting, right, that there has been a Democratic mayor for such a long time, but some of these policies that came out of community organizing were not picked up by city hall. Do you have any idea why that is? Why is it that you needed to challenge the existing Democrat?
The feeling that I get being a lifelong Buffalonian is that they don’t care about us. They care about one another. You know, the power structure cares about folks who are powerful, folks who are wealthy, folks who are influential and have largely ignored the fact the power really rests in the hands of community members and of voters and residents of the City of Buffalo. And because we’ve allowed Democrats to coast for so long, largely going unchallenged, they’ve gotten very comfortable doing nothing, even when the people have placed a demand upon them. And I think that this campaign is a really significant signal that those days of the feet-warming, three-piece suit Democrats are over in Buffalo.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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American media blamed the massive collapse of Albanian pyramid schemes in 1997 on greedy small-time investors unschooled in the free market. It could never happen here.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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There has been a purge of left-wing accounts from social media, with socialist organizations being targeted on Facebook and multiple Antifa-associated accounts suspended from Twitter.
“We have just confirmed that Facebook has disabled the page of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan, as well as the accounts of all admins,” World Socialist Website editor tweeted today. “This is an unprecedented attack on the speech rights of an official campus student group.”
World Socialist Website also reports the following:
On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred.
At least a half dozen leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This included the public account of Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and the personal account of Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site. In 2016, Niemuth was the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US Vice President.
Facebook also disabled the London Bus Drivers Rank-and-File Committee Facebook page, which was set up with the support of the Socialist Equality Party (UK) to organize opposition among bus drivers. This follows a widely discussed call for a walkout by bus drivers to demand elementary protections against the COVID-19 pandemic.
None of the individuals whose accounts were disabled had violated Facebook’s policies. Upon attempting to appeal the deletion of their account, they received an error message stating, “We cannot review the decision to disable your account.”
We have just confirmed that Facebook has disabled the page of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan, as well as the accounts of all admins. This is an unprecedented attack on the speech rights of an official campus student group.
— Andre Damon (@Andre__Damon) January 24, 2021
The New York Post reports the following:
Twitter has suspended several popular accounts with alleged ties to Antifa — which have more than 71,000 followers combined — following the Inauguration Day riots.
At least four accounts tied with the militant group have been yanked offline — including @TheBaseBK, the account for the anarchist center in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Archived web pages of the accounts show they shared more than 71,000 followers and dated as far back as 2012.
Their pages now read “Account suspended” for violating Twitter rules.
Our comrades w The Base(@TheBasebk),an anarchist social center in Brooklyn, NY of 9 years now took this Twitter thing seriously.Reaching a platform of 17k followers they pushed a very specific line where politics were never blurred. Today,Twitter took their account down,and now.. pic.twitter.com/M9PWVUZKkn
— Antifa Sacramento (@AntifaSac_) January 22, 2021
This follows a mass purge of right-wing accounts in the wake of the Capitol riot earlier this month, a swing-back of the censorship pendulum that surprises nobody who knows anything about anything. That purge was broadly supported by shitlibs and a surprisingly large percentage of the true left, despite the overwhelming and growing pile of evidence that it is impossible to consent to internet censorship for other ideologies without consenting to censorship for your own.
I encountered many arguments in support of the right-wing purge from the online left while it was happening, and none of them were good.
“They’re only banning fascists,” they told me. “Why are you defending fascists?”
Well first of all there was never any evidence that these social media corporations were only purging fascists. We know for example that included in the sweep were tens of thousands of basic QAnon posters, who while ignorant and wrong would not in most cases meet most people’s definition of “fascist”. We don’t know who else was eliminated in the purge, but believing on blind faith that Facebook and Twitter were only targeting fascists who want to violently overthrow the US government is silly.
In reality these social media giants have never claimed to be “banning fascists”, and there’s no reason to believe that’s their policy; white nationalists like Richard Spencer are still there. And even if these outlets did have a policy of “banning fascists”, what definition of “fascist” are they using? Do proponents of Silicon Valley censorship believe they’ll be using their personal definition of fascism to determine whose political speech is off limits? Do you think they’ll be calling you personally to consult you on whom to ban? How do you imagine this works exactly?
And of course opposing the normalization of government-tied monopolistic Silicon Valley oligarchs controlling worldwide political speech on the platforms an increasing number of people use to communicate important ideas is not “defending fascists”. Opposing oligarchic authoritarian control is the exact opposite of defending fascism.
Leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their @Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This is outrageous & exactly what many of us on the left feared would happen. Standing in solidarity with the @SEP_US and Mark Zuckerberg can fuck right off. https://t.co/oxU00IeZRb
— Ryan Knight
(@ProudSocialist) January 24, 2021“They always censor the left,” they told me. “We’re just happy that now they’re censoring fascists too.”
So you imagine it can’t get worse? We just saw a major escalation against leftist accounts these past few days; do you think that’s the end of it? What do you imagine will happen if the left ever gets close to actually threatening the interests of the powerful after you’ve helped manufacture consent for the normalization of internet censorship every step of the way?
It can always get worse. The online left has not yet experienced mass-scale censorship of political speech yet; it’s experienced losing a few accounts here and there. You haven’t seen anything yet. Some Twitter leftists really seem to think that getting suspended because Kamala Harris supporters mass-reported them over a mean tweet is as ugly as this thing will get. If your goal is to threaten power at some point (and if you’re a real leftist it should be), then you need to oppose the normalization of any policies that can be used to silence those who threaten the powerful.
“Well it’s not like leftist revolution will be planned on social media anyway,” they told me.
You don’t use social media to plan the leftist revolution, you use it to create more leftists. You use it to bring consciousness and understanding to your ideas and your causes. Consenting to the institutionalization of the censorship of political speech is consenting to your own silence on this front, which will mean the only people who will be able to quickly share ideas and information online with the mainstream population will be those who support the very power structures you oppose.
And make no mistake, the imperial narrative managers most certainly do need the public’s consent for internet censorship. They don’t pour vast fortunes into manufacturing consent for evil agendas because it’s fun, they do it because they require the public’s consent. The empire’s inverted totalitarianism only holds together because they’re able to maintain the illusion of freedom and democracy; the iron-fisted silencing of wholesome political speech can only happen if the public has been paced into believing it’s a good thing. Every step of the tightening of the censorship noose is a part of this pacing, and if you consent to it, you’re helping them.
Ultimately this content moderation movement will restore a system where the only allowable route to a mass audience is through a major institutional partner. https://t.co/voYAjNF6sc
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 16, 2021
“Ultimately this content moderation movement will restore a system where the only allowable route to a mass audience is through a major institutional partner,” journalist Matt Taibbi recently observed.
That is it. That is the goal. They tried allowing free speech online while simply hammering us with propaganda to keep us asleep, but people still just wanted to use the democratization of information that the internet afforded them to talk about about how horrible the status quo is. So now they’re working to reinstate the supremacy of mainstream gatekeepers.
When you realize that corporations are America’s real government, the whole “it isn’t censorship if it’s a private company doing it” argument is seen for the joke that it is. To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed on any given day, supporting this can only be self-destructive.
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