[grc] Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Sun Jan 2 20:36:36 PST 2022

Caitlin Johnstone posted: "Listen to a reading of this article:
https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/those-who-support-internet-censorship-lack-psychological-maturity
❖ Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for "

New post on *Caitlin Johnstone*
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2> Those Who Support Internet
Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/01/03/those-who-support-internet-censorship-lack-psychological-maturity/>
by
Caitlin Johnstone <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2>

*Listen to a reading of this article:
<https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/those-who-support-internet-censorship-lack-psychological-maturity>*

❖

Twitter has permanently suspended
<https://twitter.com/ZTPetrizzo/status/1477650116009943041> the personal
account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the
platform calls "repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,"
much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere.
This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone
<https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-should-not-restrict>
on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of
continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the
2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for "Covid misinformation"; that's just
today's excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot,
before that it was election security, before that it was Russian
disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real
agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization
of internet censorship itself. That's the real reason so many people get
banned.

I myself had already written many
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/internet-censorship-just-took-an-unprecedented-leap-forward-and-hardly-anyone-noticed-e6ae2d8adaf2>,
many
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/12/have-you-noticed-how-social-media-purges-always-align-with-the-us-empire/>
articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet
censorship via algorithm manipulation
<https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-algorithm-manipulation>
and deplatforming
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/10/in-a-corporatist-system-of-government-corporate-censorship-is-state-censorship/>
long before the first "Covid misinformation" bans
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/why-you-should-oppose-the-censorship-of-david-icke-hint-its-got-nothing-to-do-with-icke-4cb72d19481c>
started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US
since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that
Trump's 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a
failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly
with the agendas of the ruling power structure
<https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing>
to control the dominant narratives
<https://steemit.com/msm/@caitlinjohnstone/whoever-controls-the-narrative-controls-the-world>
about what's going on in the world.

Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress - or
even the sitting President - from using their massive platforms is
dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter's
banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.https://t.co/zIT7l04hMW
https://t.co/2BPFrgeZXv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 2, 2022
<https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1477650872339468294?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called
before the Senate Judiciary Committee
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/01/goog-n01.html> and instructed
to come up with a strategy "to prevent the fomenting of discord".

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information
rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily
transform us into the Divided States of America," the social media giants
were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added,
“Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media
users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are
silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US
government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten
progressively more intimate
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/16/biden-administration-completely-kills-the-its-a-private-company-so-its-not-censorship-argument/>,
so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to
share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the
will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn't a stunted emotional
infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms
controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you
might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to
be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can't
imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human
expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on
earth.

Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures
Which Affect Everyone

"Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last
institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse."
https://t.co/WlDypacgmM

— Caitlin Johnstone [image: ⏳] (@caitoz) December 30, 2021
<https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1476376639541972999?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this.
I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, *hate* them.
They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of
the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that
Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so
they'd often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that
perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on
their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn't
really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms
<https://apnews.com/article/youtube-qanon-conspiracy-theories-ef03a889e68239de6692ce42666d97d8>
following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating.
I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and,
if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing.
But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant
monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech
to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I
personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense
freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might
do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be
regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government
proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn't require a lot of
maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and
enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be
forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the
future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare
in some circles.

__________________________

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<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/24/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism/>,
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<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/i-permanently-release-all-copyrights-to-all-my-writing-use-any-of-it-however-you-want-9ad929b92d42>
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*Caitlin Johnstone <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2>* | January 3,
2022 at 1:29 am | Tags: censorship
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=censorship>, internet
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=internet>, Marjorie
Taylor Greene
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=marjorie-taylor-greene>,
narrative <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=narrative>,
silicon
valley <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=silicon-valley>,
Twitter <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=twitter> |
Categories: Article
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=category&term=article>, News
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=category&term=news> | URL:
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