http://www.richardpresser.com/wordpress/internet-censorship-just-took-an-unprecedented-leap-forward-and-hardly-anyone-noticed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RichardPressersBlog+%28Richard+Presser%27s+Blog%29
Internet censorship is being rapidly cranked up:
“While most indie media was focused on debating the way people talk about Kanye West and the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an unprecedented escalation in internet censorship took place which threatens everything we all care about. It received frighteningly little attention.
After a massive purge of hundreds of politically oriented pages and personal accounts for “inauthentic behavior”, Facebook rightly received a fair amount of criticism for the nebulous and hotly disputed basis for that action. What received relatively little attention was the far more ominous step which was taken next: within hours of being purged from Facebook, multiple anti-establishment alternative media sites had their accounts completely removed from Twitter as well.
As of this writing I am aware of three large alternative media outlets which were expelled from both platforms at almost the same time: Anti-Media, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police, all of whom had millions of followers on Facebook. Both the Editor-in-Chief of Anti-Media and its Chief Creative Officer were also banned by Twitter, and are being kept from having any new accounts on that site as well.
“I unfortunately always felt the day would come when alternative media would be scrubbed from major social media sites,” Anti-Media’s Chief Creative Officer S.M. Gibson said in a statement to me. “Because of that I prepared by having backup accounts years ago. The fact that those accounts, as well as 3 accounts from individuals associated with Anti-Media were banned without warning and without any reason offered by either platform makes me believe this purge was certainly orchestrated by someone. Who that is I have no idea, but this attack on information was much more concise and methodical in silencing truth than most realize or is being reported.”
End of quote.
What is not covered above is that the same thing is happening on YouTube and has been accelerating over the last few months. Expect all of this to continue, and I expect books to soon begin to disappear from Kindle. It’s been much more difficult to save them offline, away from Kindle. I have done this with many books I felt were important and may well disappear. The versions of Kindle released over the last year or two have changed their internal format, making it far more difficult to export them.
It’s all part of the time in which we live.
