Thread by @caitoz

Biden Administration Completely Kills The "It's A Private Company So It's Not Censorship" Argument

"In a corporatist system of government, where there is no separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-admini…

In what's surely the biggest "Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that" moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading "disinformation" about the Covid-19 response.

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1415727354463281159?s=20

Good thread by Greenwald on this:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1415725320381079569

Whenever you object to Silicon Valley oligarchs exerting total control over the political speech of billions of people, mainstream liberals instantly transform into an army of Ayn Rands defending the private property rights of those companies. This kills those arguments dead.

And if you were paying attention, that argument was already dead. These platforms use censorship and algorithm manipulation to hide undesirable speech from the mainstream public in direct collaboration with government and government-tied institutions.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/silicon-vall…

In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened social media platforms that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election means they need to start utilizing more censorship or else face consequences:
vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/f…

That same year these platforms were brought before congress and told they needed to adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord," because "Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words."
wsws.org/en/articles/20…

In the lead-up to the 2020 election online platforms were openly coordinating with US government agencies to censor speech believed to compromise election integrity.
archive.is/WFLKd

Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world where a third of Americans regularly get their news, openly enlists the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to determine who to censor.
atlanticcouncil.org/support-the-co…

Google, which owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA.
qz.com/1145669/google…

If US law had placed as much emphasis on the separation of corporation and state as it had on the separation of church and state, the country would be unrecognizably different from what we see today.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1415791237752360960?s=20

In a corporatist system of government, where there is no separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. The actual government as it actually exists is censoring the speech not just of its own people, but people around the world.

Only power-worshipping bootlickers want the US government controlling speech about a virus response which affects everybody, and only those with no sense of self-preservation entrust worldwide human speech to an alliance of government agencies and powerful tech plutocrats.

We cannot keep heading in this direction.

Audio version of this article:
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/bi…