Tech Platform Censorship & The Great QAnon Facebook Purge

Qanon is a LARP started by some grotty South African incel and then taken over by a pornographer who lives in the Philippines. We don\’t take D&D seriously as a culture, and Q should be no different.

Setting aside the public vs. private issue, the bar for censorship should be extremely high. I support censoring content that contains erotic child pornography or torturing kittens, but I do not support censoring people for political speech.

In the case of harmful misinformation, like “Covid-19 is less lethal than the flu” or “global warming is a liberal myth”, I suggest that rather than take down the content, the host should reply to it and label it as false information. Even then, the bar should be high, and don’t try to correct every post about every issue. Stick to a few issues that are particularly dangerous and pervasive.

I myself have been censored and suspended on FB repeatedly, usually for posting photos of massacres like Wounded Knee, My Lai, etc..

A couple of times FB labeled my posts as false information, and it turned out FB was correct and I was wrong. I don’t have a problem with that sort of editing and flagging, though it could easily be abused. But in those instances, all that FB needed to do was post a comment explaining why I was wrong, and then I would have voluntarily deleted the misinformation. Of course not everyone is willing to admit they are wrong like I am.

Despite appearances, Facebook and Google and so forth are not The Government, and regardless of what we think of them and cries of censorship!!!1, they and all their offshoots and variations have the right and authority to “curate” and “censor” anything they want any way they want. No surprise that they and many other platforms do so by skewing rightist/libertarian because that’s the ideology of their owners and many of their workers. They have no obligation not to do so, and the world doesn’t end because they follow their bliss, whatever it may be. Banning Q-whatever does not extinguish it.

For our part, it seems self-evident that part of the answer is not to use Google or Facebook and their many offshoots. Just don’t. No one has to. And the fewer who do, the less power they have. We’ve been saying this for many years. We don’t have to watch cable teevee “news” either. When it’s clear that these things are more destructive than constructive then we must disconnect from them. But that’s up to us.

Back in the Occupy era, it was clear that the local and later coordinated authorities were using postings on Facebook and Twitter among other means to track and crack down on individuals and occupations around the country and the world and many of us were saying “stop using these platforms!” Unfortunately we’re seeing the same thing happening with the BLM movement and the many other protest movements around the country and the world. They can’t imagine not using those specific platforms despite the well-known risk. Or let’s say their public face can’t imagine it.

As for Q-whatever, it’s not going away. It will continue to thrive underground, it might even strengthen.

\”Of course, many people who support Trump are probably pedos.\” That\’s a bit casual and lacking evidence. I quit reading there.

Facebook will be seen as being in league with pedophiliac Satanists, by the idiot crazies.

The truth is that corporations don’t like “hate speech” because it can result in boycotts. IMO, it’d be nice if that extended to idiot speech and crazy talk, but those things are half the fun and don’t usually result in boycotts.

They were right to bring in Zuckerberg for an attitude adjustment after Cambridge Analytica. Debates over the scope and limits of concentrated power, government or corporate or both in concert, is a good thing.

Aren’t facebook algorithms already a form of censorship?

QAnon is trailer park Scientology. At best.

Could just be an Internet prank.

It’s somewhat ironic that these people think more or less as the Tiv people in Nigeria think (or thought, they may have changed since the Bohannans made their famous ethnographical work on them in the 1950s). They believe(d) that influential people were influential because they were cannibals and ate human flesh.

They could simply not imagine that their own society made certain people more influential than others. That their own societal rules were in some way faulty. It had to be that the influential people were in some way “evil”.

In other words, they were exactly as self-righteous as the American Right, with exactly the same result.

Although not perfect, the Fairness Doctrine instituted by the FCC in 1949 went a long way to address this issue. It was an attempt to prevent a Goebbles type degeneration of media such as happened in Germany in the 1930’s. Not censorship per se, but forcing a variety of views to be presented on controversial topics on any media platform. It could be adapted to the internet. Reagan’s FCC got rid of it in 1987. Of course. And wingnit talk radio and the Murdich money grubbers arise immediately.

@ “catholics”

I know a lot of Catholics who despise their own pope. I just had one tell me he’d rather “trust the truth’” (political conservatism) than “a liberal sounding” pope even if the pope backs up his social commentary with quotes from scripture. He didn’t bother to explain his rationale, preferring to run away instead.

I try to explain to the faithful that their faith is dying off because half of our youth have no interest in the mental hypocrisy they observe, and are seeking other spiritual avenues which make more sense to them. “Absolutely not!” the faithful say. They’d rather blame some external Satan-inspired entity than do any soul searching.

Meanwhile the saner elders amongst them either quietly leave, take advantage of the remaining gullible, or suffer in silence, condensing the faithful into an increasingly cultish nutball, which outshouts and outmobs their “enemy” brethren from other churches.

I come from a religious family. It’s very sad to observe.

Maybe this is what happened to the Roman deities. Maybe there’ll be another Constantine who makes some brave new religion the new state religion. Chomsky claimed that Constantine converted Christianity from Jesus’ religion for the powerless meek, into his own religion for the rich which has been effectively managing the meek ever since. I don’t know, but I did have a skilled dirty politician tell me that Christians were his favorite tools, very easy to manipulate, because they’re so oblivious to and forgiving of, their own base impulses. Not to mention that Jesus would never lead them astray, not after all that praying. But he told me in private, of course.

Plague Species, you\’re wrong. It\’s exactly what I said it is. If you don\’t want to accept that, fine. That\’s your problem. It\’s a goofy game for people who have nothing else in their lives, and its run by two dudes in the Philippines. I\’m not making this shit up.

Nah, I’m just regurgitating what every single internet platform that allows communication from and among the unwashed has been saying nonstop since forevah. Restricting free speech is only illegal (sometimes) when Government does it. Private businesses (such as Zuckerberg’s little folly) can do what they want, censoring and banning and otherwise limiting the Free Speech of participants any way they want whenever they want. Pure libertarian liberty to do as they wilt. Milton Friedman had nothing to do with it. Tech geniuses made these rules and have enforced them throughout the w. w. w. and there’s nothing the unwashed can do about it.

So if whatever-borg wants to ban say Q-nonsense or jigger algorithms to shadow ban lefty sites, they can do it. If they want to host porn, they can do it — but they can also ban it. They can promote or seek to undermine whatever mind-fuckery they want. We can go on and on about supposed freedom, and how insistent tech giants and small fry have long been that they have the absolute right to suppress free speech as they see fit.

This is the world they demanded and made. Now that some of the biggies are pulling the plug on
-Q- we’re supposed to fret over it, I don’t know why. We’ve been conditioned to believe, have we not, that anything they want to do (that’s legal) they can. And if it isn’t legal, they can have the law changed. Or just ignore it.

@bruce

I saw that Taibbi is trying to worm his way out of this conundrum. ¨It’s more complicated,” he says, than just banning Q and the like from Facebook. And yet since the beginning of internet time, the proprietors have asserted their absolute right to do as they please, ban and promote whoever they want, and so we get to this point, as Ian is suggesting, where “you” — Bruce — or anyone, any thought or opinion, and any idea might be next.

You would have no recourse, would you?

The fact is, ‘neo-feudalism’ as you call it is built into the systems we use, and you (metaphorically) were banned at the outset. Just like a Black person in Justice Taney’s rendered opinion, you have no rights on the internet that a proprietor is bound to respect. Read your TOS. And I think you know that.

The suggestion that because Big Tech works hand in glove with government (and always has; it came from government development after all) banning Q is some sort of backdoor government censorship effort which will eventually consume all dissent from the official line, is gobsmackingly obvious. Of course it is. The promise of “freedom” on the internet was always a con.

Freedom for whom, to do what? That question is now being answered. The answer was never really in doubt, though, was it?

And that, Plague, takes us back to a question I raised ten years or so ago: is it a Brave New World, or 1984? Are there jack-boots at our throats, or are we willfully distracted?

Orwell warned that we will be overcome by externally opposed oppression – the Big Brother boogieman – whereas Huxley sees that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would want to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information and conceal the truth; Huxley feared the truth would be drown in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared would become a trivial culture.

In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared that we will love what will ruin us.

Mr Wilder,

Ché etc seeks to create a world that it is so dysfunctional that it collapses and then…

And then, the desperate surviving souls will seek guidance from the greatest of internet thought leaders…which would, of course, be, Ché-or-somebody-similar…

…and so it will come to pass that world will be inspired by the leadership of, Ché-or-somebody-similar and the dawn of new and greater enlightenment, such as the world has never seen before, will then come into being…or so the fantasy goes.

Actually, in the real world, history is replete with the chaos of dark ages and the recovery. The recover stage is long and arduous but eventually somebody emerges, sadly, such a “pure” society is surrounded by dark, violent barberry and is “forced” to adopt cruel practices…and well..so it goes.

Hoping for a great collapse which would be then followed by a great enlightenment, who’s “original” structure is conceived by, [Ché-or-somebody-similar] is perhaps one of the most commonly expressed thoughts on the internet. Any person who offers a utopia that requires the complete abolition of what “is” to get to what they “envision” should be seen alongside others who have executed such “visions”, Jim Jones and Pol Pot spring to mind but, there are so many other disastrous “leaders” to choose from.

The signal remained the same. The noise went up exponentially. Consider Alex Jones, the boy who cried”false flag”. By calling everything a false flag, he calls all such into question, this even actual false flags can be dismissed as so much “foil hat” blither

Surveillance. Manipulation. Control. That’s what this Big Tech is all about, and that’s what it’s always been about. We knew that in the ’70s, some in the ’60s, and we know it now. The fascinating thing, from a certain standpoint, is not that Q! was banned, it was that it was so freaking easy to manipulate so many people to believe that nonsense, and to live in the game “Q” was playing with them. That was the whole raison d’etre of Q in the original Star Trek, no? He could shift his shape and make people believe and do things just like that. He did it because he could. Most were powerless to resist.

I’m not going to worry about what is banned or censored on Faceborg or any of the other communications platforms. They are not the only way and certainly not the best way to get news and information.

But I would like to see the nature and purpose of corporate/private enterprise be focused on public good. However that is eventually defined by the public… (oh, but here we go into another rabbit hole…;-)

. . . really it was the hysteria about a possible Russian role in the 2016 election that started the censorship ball rolling.

no, not “really”

the Russiagate hysteria was created deliberately by some of the same forces that are pushing censorship by algorithm and purge.

QAnon was a demonstration of just how easy it is to put out completely crazy ideas in an information ecology where there are no or very few trustworthy governors committed to discriminating between fact and fiction or willing to model good judgment.

The introduction of censorship under the guise of dealing with the more absurd consequences of a flood of disinformation should not suggest that this is not a problem needing a solution.

Consider the role of the Steele Dossier in ginning up Russiagate. Where were the authorities willing to vet the quality of the Dossier in some reasonable time frame — three weeks instead of three years???

Why doesn’t The Guardian pay a price for its betrayal of Assange?

Why is Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity “trusted” by anyone?