When I saw SPK blogging here, I couldn’t resist the Auld Lang Syne and asked Ian for permission to post sometimes. I wrote for the Agonist in the 2000s.
I’ve followed Whitney Webb since she wrote for MintPress News and find her to be an extremely informative and critical voice, especially about the nexus of tech and finance. Her work frequently frightens me and if I were a Titan of Silicon Valley I would certainly want her silenced.
Her post on Twitter earlier this week caught my eye because it revealed a sort of fuckery that was new to me:
Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single one is a scammy video using my words and likeness to shill everything from shitcoins to insane predictions I’d never make. Collectively, they have gotten millions of views.
YouTube seems to be adopting an AI version of “security through obscurity” to bury the work of Webb and other dissenting voices. This approach won’t work if it’s your only means of concealing valuables or trade secrets.
But if the only goal is to make it harder for Webb’s audience to find her work, it’s a nasty new wrinkle.
Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms, it was like being the narrator of an H.P. Lovecraft story who’s just discovered some horrible new tentacle of Cthulhu but you know you’ll sound crazy if you try to explain it to your friends or family.