Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 19, 2021 8:41 am

But that doesn't matter if you are careful where you take things and use regular burners.
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Re: Have you lost your collective fucking minds?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:00 pm

DrEvil » Mon Jan 18, 2021 3:36 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant » Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:35 am wrote:
DrEvil » Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:16 pm wrote:
stickdog99 » Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:41 pm wrote:
DrEvil » 17 Jan 2021 06:10 wrote:
Harvey » Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:25 am wrote:
Luther Blissett wrote:Fuck Parker. Fuck any platform that protects fascists. In the future, no truly democratic community would harbor nazis if truly informed and free from old propaganda and lies.


Cannot believe I'm reading this crap. Free speech is the protection of fascism?

How many of you actually read a single word on Parler? Once you've answered that, maybe we could talk about what Parler is or isn't. Anyway, your entire culture is already fascist. Mine too, but I'm not about to start crying out for censorship like a brainwashed idiot.

Think that's a wrap for me, Jack. Is it possible to delete my account so that I can't return to this cess pool?


But he's not wrong. Every fascist regime started out with fascism being tolerated, until suddenly only fascism was tolerated.


So total intolerance is the final solution to fascism?


Intolerance of fascism is step one in preventing fascism from taking root. Why is this so hard to understand? You do not tolerate the people who want to line you up against a wall and shoot you. And piss off with your "final solution" jabs, you clearly need a history lesson or two (hint: guess who came up with the final solution?)


So you're doubling down on your delusions, then.

Fascism has ALREADY taken root, FFS.

I know my history all too well. I'm not the one that may need a refresher.

How did Hitler come into power? What underlying/contributing factors allowed for the accumulation of Germany's power? Did he not have the support of the German populace, prior to his extreme acts?
The parallels are certainly there. Unfortunately you and others are misreading what's in front of you.


Yes, fascism was already there, but covertly, hiding behind the illusion of democracy. The storming of the Capitol was fascism taking its mask off, and a frankly scary number of people are fine with that.

The Beer Belly Putsch didn't happen in a vacuum, it was encouraged, financed and facilitated by the fascist power structures already in place. It was the fascists you are worried about testing the waters. It's all the same thing.


It's amazing how demonstrable, overtly fascist actions have been implemented domestically, across numerous nations, and yet a wholly unsuccessful* and largely staged event to "storm the Capitol" -- but not the blatantly repressive acts perpetrated by authority figures over the past ~year, let alone less overt acts historically -- is the sole event fingered as the 'removal of the fascist mask'.

Even with eyes 'open', many continue to be blind.


*or perhaps successful, depending on perspective: it clearly succeeded in generating reactions, for example, and also in stoking public interest in new restrictive legislation.

Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 20, 2021 2:52 pm wrote:.


Holocaust Survivor: Don’t Let Authorities Use Fear to Turn You Into a ‘Robot’

Holocaust survivor and activist Vera Sharav has some strong words for adults who value their health and individual freedom ...


Holocaust survivor and activist Vera Sharav has some strong words for adults who value their health and individual freedom: Start “rebelling against things that are wrong,” and stand up against attacks on medical and individual freedom, launched by corporations and governments, under the guise of keeping us “safe” from COVID-19.

“It’s a very dangerous thing to do to just follow,” Sharav said in an interview with Stand for Health Freedom.

The founder of Alliance for Human Research Protection shared the harrowing story of how, as a 6-year-old, her refusal to follow orders literally saved her life. She suggests that what today we call “oppositional defiant disorder” is not really a “disorder” at all, but instead a life-saving strategy.

In the interview, Sharav draws parallels between Nazi Germany — including how the regime conducted medical experiments on children and adults — and what’s happening today around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adults are “going around like sheep,” just as they were during her childhood in Germany, Sharav says. “If you deny the human individual the right to think and question and assess and make decisions based on their own judgment and experience, then you are creating robots,” she says.

Watch Part 1 of the interview with Sharav below and sign up here for Part 2, so you’ll know when it is released.




https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defe ... rav-covid/


As of now:
- control of information (via Big Tech or pending legislation);
- excessive lockdowns and related mandates forced on populations, leading to massive devastation of liveiloods, LIVES, and smaller businesses;
- travel restrictions/bans;
- FEAR-MONGERING, including the implementation of covert psychological strategies - or 'nudges' - to promote people's compliance with draconian restrictions;
- threats of incarceration for acts identified as "domestic terrorism" (to be defined by authorities/politicians/bureaucrats/technocrats).

2021 is likely to expand and further enforce the above measures, among others.

FASCISM. It's right there. The BRIGHT PINK ELEPHANT IN YOUR LIVING ROOM. And yet, many continue to navigate around the beast, head down.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Jan 20, 2021 9:28 pm

technically Fascism happens when an ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, corporate (as in body corporate not corporations) state aligns its economy to constant conquest and war.

Is that the US now?

No.

Its not.

Its very close tho. One element missing was the ethno-nationalist bit and it showed its face a couple of weeks ago.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Marionumber1 » Wed Jan 20, 2021 10:32 pm

One can make a reasonable argument that the current incarnation of the United States is fascist in function even if not in explicit form, as Dave McGowan did in his book Understanding the F-Word. I believe that a state with the relevant markers can be called fascist even before it reaches the most overt expression that we associate with Germany, Italy, or Spain at their very worst. Features like ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism might be lacking on the surface, but institutional racism and the lack (for a great many intents and purposes) of a functioning democracy lead to very similar outcomes to what openly ethno-nationalistic and authoritarian policies would. Fascism before it has fully taken hold can masquerade as a free and democratic system much like the one here in the USA. Which is not to say there won't be efforts by individuals in this system (such as Trump, his backers, and his followers) to move it further into overt fascism.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 20, 2021 11:19 pm

.
Mario:
One can make a reasonable argument that the current incarnation of the United States is fascist in function even if not in explicit form, as Dave McGowan did in his book Understanding the F-Word. I believe that a state with the relevant markers can be called fascist even before it reaches the most overt expression that we associate with Germany, Italy, or Spain at their very worst.

Yes: It's antiquated to view historical representation of overt fascism (Germany/Italy/Spain, as you point out) and expect modern iterations to 'look the same'. We are in a markedly distinct world now in key respects, due in large part to the greater ease in manipulating sentiment (as I remarked earlier: Goebbels could only dream of the nefarious possibilities inherent to 'social media' platforms).

Mario:
Fascism before it has fully taken hold can masquerade as a free and democratic system much like the one here in the USA. Which is not to say there won't be efforts by individuals in this system (such as Trump, his backers, and his followers) to move it further into overt fascism.


It's short-sighted to suggest only those that follow 'Trump-ism' are the ones knocking on the door of overt fascism. As I (and a few others) have highlighted at length, we are already, in may respects, within the boundaries of overt fascism, due in no small part to the compliance and acquiescence of self-identified "liberals"/"leftists"/"wokesters" clamoring for egregious govt overreach measures (referenced at the tail-end of my prior reply above). This is a generality, of course. There are exceptions -- individuals across party affiliations or political leanings that see past current dogma/propaganda efforts.

The ones most responsible for current REPRESSIVE measures are clearly not the "TRUMP-ISTS". They have been tossed out, and efforts will be made to root them out --- Indeed, 'Trump-ist' activities in the coming year+ will be promptly labeled as acts of "domestic terrorism", to be met with the full force of new laws to be passed -- while the cheerleaders of the current regime heartily support and dutifully/blindly follow the conditioning mechanisms in place since the onset of the 2020 "crisis event" (No, it's not an f'ing pandemic -- this should be clear by now); no end in sight for the continued destruction of essential human dignity and agency.
(I can no longer use the word "freedom", as this is now a trigger word for Big Tech algorithms, to be promptly flagged for erasure, as it may lead to thoughts of domestic terrorism).

Thankfully, this site is largely obscure, so I should be ok.

(wishful thinking: I've been marked long ago)
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby dada » Wed Jan 20, 2021 11:51 pm

"we are already, in may respects, within the boundaries of overt fascism"

Yes, it's called Capitalism. Capitalism is having a Maoist moment. Perma-culture revolution. Great Reset Forward. That's Maoist Capitalism, not fascism.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby stickdog99 » Fri Jan 22, 2021 5:13 pm

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Shoshana Zuboff

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Feb 03, 2021 7:02 am

Remember, this is a letter to the Times.

Agree or disagree with this or that observation -- I majorly do on several points -- but make sure you read the early section on the four stages of the epistemic coup (and read the damn thing whole if you're going to trash it).

The Coup We Are Not Talking About

We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

By Shoshana Zuboff
Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

Jan. 29, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opin ... ology.html


Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.

I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me.

The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital.

Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We live in the digital century during the formative years of information civilization. Our time is comparable to the early era of industrialization, when owners had all the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations. The intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.

This past year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is the fight for the soul of our information civilization.

Welcome to the third decade.

The Surveillance Exception

The public tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates over federal privacy legislation to a mania for total information awareness, turning Silicon Valley’s innovative surveillance practices into objects of intense interest. As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed, the intelligence community would have to “rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it,” in order to reach beyond constitutional, legal, or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today. By 2013, the CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s mission “to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible. The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data.

Young entrepreneurs without any democratic mandate landed a windfall of infinite information and unaccountable power. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, exercised absolute control over the production, organization and presentation of the world’s information. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has had absolute control over what would become a primary means of global communication and news consumption, along with all the information concealed in its networks. The group’s membership grew, and a swelling population of global users proceeded unaware of what just happened.

The license to steal came with a price, binding the executives to the continued patronage of elected officials and regulators as well as the sustained ignorance, or at least learned resignation, of users. The doctrine was, after all, a political doctrine, and its defense would require a future of political maneuvering, appeasement, engagement and investment.

Google led the way with what would become one of the world’s richest lobbying machines. In 2018 nearly half the Senate received contributions from Facebook, Google and Amazon, and the companies continue to set spending records.

Most significant, surveillance exceptionalism has meant that the United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding principle of social order. With this forfeit, democratic governments crippled their ability to sustain the trust of their people, intensifying the rationale for surveillance.

The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos

To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.

In a leaked memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what engages you.

I’m homing in now on Facebook not because it’s the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it’s the largest social media company and its consequences reach farthest.

The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.

Key to this story is that the politics of appeasement required little more than a refusal to mitigate, modify or eliminate the ugly truth of surveillance economics. Surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives turned Facebook into a societal tinderbox. Mr. Zuckerberg merely had to stand down and commit himself to the bystander role.

Internal research presented in 2016 and 2017 demonstrated causal links between Facebook’s algorithmic targeting mechanisms and epistemic chaos. One researcher concluded that the algorithms were responsible for the viral spread of divisive content that helped fuel the growth of German extremist groups. Recommendation tools accounted for 64 percent of “extremist group joins,” she found — dynamics not unique to Germany.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018 riveted the world’s attention on Facebook in a new way, offering a window for bold change. The public began to grasp that Facebook’s political advertising business is a way to rent the company’s suite of capabilities to microtarget users, manipulate them and sow epistemic chaos, pivoting the whole machine just a few degrees from commercial to political objectives.

The company launched some modest initiatives, promising more transparency, a more robust system of third-party fact checkers and a policy to limit “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” but through it all, Mr. Zuckerberg conceded the field to Mr. Trump’s demands for unfettered access to the global information bloodstream.

Mr. Zuckerberg rejected internal proposals for operational changes that would reduce epistemic chaos. A political whitelist identified over 100,000 officials and candidates whose accounts were exempted from fact-checking, despite internal research showing that users tend to believe false information shared by politicians. In September 2019 the company said that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.

To placate his critics in 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg commissioned a civil rights audit led by Laura Murphy, a former director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. The report published in 2020 is a cri de coeur expressed in a river of words that bear witness to dashed hopes — “disheartened,” “frustrated,” “angry,” “dismayed,” “fearful,” “heartbreaking.”

The report is consistent with a nearly complete rupture of the American public’s faith in Big Tech. When asked how Facebook would adjust to a political shift toward a possible Biden administration, a company spokesman, Nick Clegg, responded, “We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.” And so it did. On Jan. 7, the day after it became clear that Democrats would control the Senate, Facebook announced that it would indefinitely block Mr. Trump’s account.

We are meant to believe that the destructive effects of epistemic chaos are the inevitable cost of cherished rights to freedom of speech. No. Just as catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are the consequence of burning fossil fuels, epistemic chaos is a consequence of surveillance capitalism’s bedrock commercial operations, aggravated by political obligations and set into motion by a 20-year-old dream of total information that slid into nightmare. Then a plague came to America, turning the antisocial media conflagration into a wildfire.

Epistemic Chaos Meets a Mysterious Microorganism

As early as February 2020, the World Health Organization reported a Covid-19 “infodemic,” with myths and rumors spreading on social media. By March, researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center concluded that medical misinformation related to the coronavirus was “being propagated at an alarming rate on social media,” endangering public safety.

The Washington Post reported in late March that with nearly 50 percent of the content on Facebook’s news feed related to Covid-19, a very small number of “influential users” were driving the reading habits and feeds of a vast number of users. A study released in April by the Reuters Institute confirmed that high-level politicians, celebrities and other prominent public figures produced 20 percent of the misinformation in their sample, but attracted 69 percent of social media engagements in their sample.

A study released in May by Britain’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified a core group of 34 extremist right-wing websites disseminating Covid disinformation or linked to established health misinformation hubs now focused on Covid-19. From January to April of 2020, public Facebook posts linking to these websites garnered 80 million interactions, while posts linking to the W.H.O.’s website received 6.2 million interactions, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received 6.4 million.

An Avaaz study released in August exposed 82 websites spreading Covid misinformation reaching a peak of nearly half a billion Facebook views in April. Content from the 10 most popular websites drew about 300 million Facebook views, compared with 70 million for 10 leading health institutions. Facebook’s modest content moderation efforts were no match for its own machine systems engineered for epistemic chaos.

In October a report from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University estimated the number of avoidable Covid-19 deaths. More than 217,000 Americans had died. Tragically, the analysis concluded that at least 130,000 of those deaths could have been avoided. Of the four key reasons cited, details of each one, including the “lack of mask mandate” and “misleading the public,” reflect the orgy of epistemic chaos loosed upon America’s daughters and sons.

This is the world in which a deadly mysterious microorganism flourished. We turned to Facebook in search of information. Instead we found lethal strategies of epistemic chaos for profit.

Epistemic Terrorism

In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a short book of seminal importance, “The Social Construction of Reality.” Its central observation is that the “everyday life” we experience as “reality” is actively and perpetually constructed by us. This ongoing miracle of social order rests on “common sense knowledge,” which is “the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of everyday life.”

Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That’s because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We’re not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another’s common sense. No society is viable without it.

“All societies are constructions in the face of chaos,” write Berger and Luckmann. Because norms are summaries of our common sense, norm violation is the essence of terrorism — terrifying because it repudiates the most taken-for-granted social certainties. “Norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the target of terror,” write Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman in “Political Terrorism,” a widely cited text on the subject. Everyone experiences the shock, disorientation, and fear. The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are essential because they buffer us from chaos by formalizing our common sense.

Deaths of kings and peaceful transfers of power in democracies are critical moments that heighten society’s vulnerability. The norms and laws that guide these junctures are rightly treated with maximum gravity. Mr. Trump and his allies prosecuted an election-fraud disinformation campaign that ultimately translated into violence. It took direct aim at American democracy’s point of maximum institutional vulnerability and its most fundamental norms. As such, it qualifies as a form of epistemic terrorism, an extreme expression of epistemic chaos. Mr. Zuckerberg’s determination to lend his economic machine to the cause makes him an accessory to this assault.

Like baseball, everyday reality is an adventure that begins and ends at home base, where we are safe. No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart. Democrats drinking blood? Sure, why not? Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19? Right this way! Storm the Capitol and make Mr. Trump dictator? Yeah, we’ve got that!

Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.

Social media’s no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.

For many who hold freedom of speech as a sacred right, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States is a touchstone. “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he wrote. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.

Our susceptibility to the destruction of common sense reflects a young information civilization that has not yet found its footing in democracy. Unless we interrupt surveillance economics and revoke the license to steal that legitimates its antisocial operations, the other coup will continue to strengthen and produce fresh crises. What must be done now?

Three Principles for the Third Decade

Let’s begin with a thought experiment: Imagine a 20th century with no federal laws to regulate child labor or assert standards for workers’ wages, hours and safety; no workers’ rights to join a union, strike or bargain collectively; no consumer rights; and no governmental institutions to oversee laws and policies intended to make the industrial century safe for democracy. Instead, each company was left to decide for itself what rights it would recognize, what policies and practices it would employ and how its profits would be distributed. Fortunately, those rights, laws and institutions did exist, invented by people over decades across the world’s democracies. As important as those extraordinary inventions remain, they do not protect us from the epistemic coup and its anti-democratic effects.

The deficit reflects a larger pattern: The United States and the world’s other liberal democracies have thus far failed to construct a coherent political vision of a digital century that advances democratic values, principles and government. While the Chinese have designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their system of authoritarian rule, the West has remained compromised and ambivalent.

This failure has left a void where democracy should be, and the dangerous result has been a two-decade drift toward private systems of surveillance and behavioral control outside the constraints of democratic governance. This is the road to the final stage of the epistemic coup. The result is that our democracies march naked into the third decade without the new charters of rights, legal frameworks and institutional forms necessary to ensure a digital future that is compatible with the aspirations of a democratic society.

We are still in the early days of an information civilization. The third decade is our opportunity to match the ingenuity and determination of our 20th-century forebears by building the foundations for a democratic digital century.

Democracy is under the kind of siege that only democracy can end. If we are to defeat the epistemic coup, then democracy must be the protagonist.

I offer three principles that can help guide these beginnings:

The democratic rule of law

The digital must live in democracy’s house, not as an arsonist but as a member of the family, subject to and thriving on its laws and values. The sleeping giant of democracy finally stirs, with important legislative and legal initiatives underway in America and Europe. In the United States, five comprehensive bills, 15 related bills, and one important legislative proposal, each with material significance for surveillance capitalism, were introduced in Congress from 2019 to mid-2020. Californians welcomed landmark privacy legislation. In 2020 the Congressional Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law issued a far-reaching analysis of the antitrust case against the tech giants. In October the Department of Justice, joined by 11 states, initiated a federal antitrust suit against Google for abuse of its online search monopoly. By December the Federal Trade Commission filed a landmark lawsuit against Facebook for anticompetitive actions, joined by a suit from 48 attorneys general. Those were swiftly followed by a suit launched by 38 attorneys general challenging Google’s core search engine as an anticompetitive means of blocking rivals and privileging its own services.

Antitrust arguments are important for two reasons: They signal that democracy is once again on the move, and they legitimate more regulatory attention to companies designated as market dominant. But when it comes to defeating the epistemic coup, the antitrust paradigm falls short. Here’s why.

The turn to antitrust recalls the anticompetitive practices and concentrations of economic power in the Gilded Age monopolies. As Tim Wu, an antitrust champion, explained in The Times, “Facebook’s strategy was similar to John D. Rockefeller’s at Standard Oil during the 1880s. Both companies scanned the horizon of the marketplace, searching for potential competitors, and then bought them or buried them.” He added that “it was precisely this business model that Congress banned in 1890” with the Sherman Antitrust Act.

It’s true that Facebook, Google and Amazon, among others, are ruthless capitalists as well as ruthless surveillance capitalists, but exclusive focus on their Standard Oil-style monopoly power raises two problems. First, antitrust did not succeed that well, even on the terms of its late-19th- and early-20th-century prosecutors and their aim of ending unfair concentrations of economic power in the oil industry. In 1911 a Supreme Court decision broke up Standard Oil into 34 fossil fuel industry companies. The combined value of the companies proved greater than the original. The largest of the 34 had all the advantages of Standard Oil’s infrastructure and scale and quickly moved toward mergers and acquisitions, becoming fossil fuel empires in their own right, including Exxon and Mobil (which became ExxonMobil), Amoco and Chevron.

A second and far more significant problem with antitrust is that while it may be important to address anticompetitive practices in ruthless companies, it is not sufficient to address the harms of surveillance capitalism, any more than the 1911 decision addressed the harms of fossil fuel production and consumption. Rather than assess Facebook, Amazon or Google through a 19th-century lens, we should reinterpret the case of Standard Oil from the perspective of our century.

Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet. If the jurists and lawmakers of that era had ignored these facts, we would have looked on their actions as a stain on American history.

Indeed, the court’s decision did ignore the far more pressing threats to American workers and consumers. A historian of American law, Lawrence Friedman, describes the Sherman Antitrust Act as “something of a fraud” that accomplished little but to satisfy “political needs.” He explains that Congress “had to answer the call for action — some action, any action — against the trusts” and the act was their answer. Then as now, people wanted a giant killer.

They turned to law as the only force that could right the balance of power. But it took decades for lawmakers to finally address the real sources of harm by codifying new rights for workers and consumers. The National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed the right to unionize while regulating the actions of employers, wasn’t enacted until 1935, 45 years after the Sherman Antitrust Act. We do not have 45 years — or 20 or 10 — to linger before we address the real harms of the epistemic coup and their causes.

There may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the big tech empires, but carving up Facebook or any of the others into the surveillance capitalist equivalents of Exxon, Chevron and Mobil would not shield us from the clear and present dangers of surveillance capitalism. Our time demands more.

New conditions summon new rights

New legal rights are crystallized in response to the changing conditions of life. Justice Louis Brandeis’s commitment to privacy rights, for example, was stimulated by the spread of photography and its ability to invade and steal what was regarded as private.

A democratic information civilization cannot progress without new charters of epistemic rights that protect citizens from the massive-scale invasion and theft compelled by surveillance economics. During most of the modern age, citizens of democratic societies have regarded a person’s experience as inseparable from the individual — inalienable. It follows that the right to know about one’s experience has been considered elemental, bonded to each of us like a shadow. We each decide if and how our experience is shared, with whom and for what purpose.

Writing in 1967, Justice William Douglas argued that the authors of the Bill of Rights believed “the individual should have the freedom to select for himself the time and circumstances when he will share his secrets with others and decide the extent of that sharing.” That “freedom to select” is the elemental epistemic right to know ourselves, the cause from which all privacy flows.

For example, as the natural bearer of such rights, I do not give Amazon’s facial recognition the right to know and exploit my fear for targeting and behavioral predictions that benefit others’ commercial aims. It’s not simply that my feelings are not for sale, it’s that my feelings are unsale-able because they are inalienable. I do not give Amazon my fear, but they take it from me anyway, just another data point in the trillions fed to the machines that day.

Our elemental epistemic rights are not codified in law because they had never come under systematic threat, any more than we have laws to protect our rights to stand up or sit down or yawn.

But the surveillance capitalists have declared their right to know our lives. Thus dawns a new age, founded on and shielded by the unwritten doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism. Now the once taken-for-granted right to know and to decide who knows about us must be codified in law and protected by democratic institutions, if it is to exist at all.

Unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions

Just as new conditions of life reveal the need for new rights, the harms of the epistemic coup require purpose-built solutions. This is how law evolves, growing and adapting from one era to the next.

When it comes to the new conditions imposed by surveillance capitalism, most discussions about law and regulation focus downstream on arguments about data, including its privacy, accessibility, transparency and portability, or on schemes to buy our acquiescence with (minimal) payments for data. Downstream is where we argue about content moderation and filter bubbles, where lawmakers and citizens stamp their feet at recalcitrant executives.

Downstream is where the companies want us to be, so consumed in the details of the property contract that we forget the real issue, which is that their property claim itself is illegitimate.

What unprecedented solutions can address the unprecedented harms of the epistemic coup? First, we go upstream to supply, and we end the data collection operations of commercial surveillance. Upstream, the license to steal works its relentless miracles, employing surveillance strategies to spin the straw of human experience — my fear, their breakfast conversation, your walk in the park — into the gold of proprietary data supplies. We need legal frameworks that interrupt and outlaw the massive-scale extraction of human experience. Laws that stop data collection would end surveillance capitalism’s illegitimate supply chains. The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.

Next, we need laws that tie data collection to fundamental rights and data use to public service, addressing the genuine needs of people and communities. Data is no longer the means of information warfare waged on the innocent.

Third, we disrupt the financial incentives that reward surveillance economics. We can prohibit commercial practices that exert demand for rapacious data collection. Democratic societies have outlawed markets that trade in human organs and babies. Markets that trade in human beings were outlawed, even when they supported whole economies.

These principles are already shaping democratic action. The Federal Trade Commission initiated a study of social media and video-streaming companies less than a week after filing its case against Facebook and said it intended to “lift the hood” of internal operations “to carefully study their engines.” A statement by three commissioners took aim at tech companies “capable of surveilling and monetizing … our personal lives,” adding that “too much about the industry remains dangerously opaque.”

Groundbreaking legislative proposals in the European Union and Britain will, if passed, begin to institutionalize the three principles. The E.U. framework would assert democratic governance over the largest platforms’ black boxes of internal operations, including comprehensive audit and enforcement authority. Fundamental rights and the rule of law would no longer vaporize at the cyberborder, as lawmakers insist on “a safe, predictable, and trusted online environment.” In Britain the Online Harms Bill would establish a legal “duty of care” that would hold the tech companies responsible for public harms and include broad new authorities and enforcement powers.

Two sentences often attributed to Justice Brandeis feature in the congressional subcommittee’s impressive antitrust report. “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” The statement so relevant to Brandeis’s time remains a pungent commentary on the old capitalism we know, but it ignores the new capitalism that knows us. Unless democracy revokes the license to steal and challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance, the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform democracy itself. We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. We have a democratic information civilization to build, and there is no time to waste.


The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Feb 03, 2021 1:46 pm

.

my quick/drive-by take on the above piece is:

certainly worthy of sharing given the description of the "four stages of the epistemic coup", which in my view was well-articulated.

My issue with the rest of it is this continued assumption that we have a "democracy" -- we don't. We haven't. We have the optics of democracy, curated for those that opt not to dig deeper, but that's not the premise of his piece.

Also: I'm fascinated [or a more apt descriptor: disturbed] by this growing trend of calling out disinfo/misinfo... while liberally [wittingly, or unwittingly -- or both] sprinkling misinfo/disinfo throughout one's output! It's post-satire/irony. Or more gaslighting. Or all of the above, and more.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Feb 03, 2021 2:16 pm

Belligerent Savant » Wed Feb 03, 2021 12:46 pm wrote:Also: I'm fascinated [or a more apt descriptor: disturbed] by this growing trend of calling out disinfo/misinfo... while liberally [wittingly, or unwittingly -- or both] sprinkling misinfo/disinfo throughout one's output! It's post-satire/irony. Or more gaslighting. Or all of the above, and more.


I have to say neither/nor/none. Can we accept that she believes all that she writes? Because to me it's evident that she does, and that her belief is the product of her own careful consideration over decades, as she does. Right or wrong, she is formidable and serious. Even where her thinking may be false factually or logically. She of all people has done the work, and has had the luck to do it as a genuinely free and tenured academic pursuing her own interests autonomously and scrupulously (an increasingly small minority, sadly). So where we both probably agree with her conclusions the most (about the tech company surveillance tyranny), she certainly comes across as formidable, and serious, and insightful, and welcome.

As for where we don't: most, well at least many, people who share a Covid narrative that you and I may both disagree with have considered what is in front of them carefully, and arrived at their belief through what they take to be study, empiricism and logic, and genuinely moral thinking. The same applies to most people who share a Capitol Putsch narrative (something that you and I presumably still disagree about with each other). It's mostly not satire, or inclusion of misinfo/disinfo, or even social reflex. Especially as we get away from the Instapunditry fields of Twitter and such. Where most of the world can be found.

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Feb 03, 2021 2:42 pm

.

All sound points, of course -- and i did include 'unwitting' as an option. As a tangential counter:

Broadly, this ties to the impact 'higher education' may have on how one views the world, what a 'highly educated' individual may readily accept as a given, and the dearth of critical thinking, both as a 'training' mechanism throughout modern U.S.-based school systems, and subsequent application -- lack thereof -- in the world-at-large.

In short, the system is training the highly educated to be more accepting of status quo premises by default.
(Indeed, as the school-educated -- particularly those that attend[ed] more affluent schools -- progress in their respective career trajectories, more often than not acceptance of status quo is incentivized, both monetarily and as a means for furthering their position/standing)

That's not to say that everything should be questioned/scrutinized, necessarily (though it's clear by now my position is that, increasingly, most events should not be taken at face-value). But how much does the typical NY Times reader (who, on average, will be at least relatively well-educated) apply a healthy measure of discernment in what they read? Versus simply accepting/absorbing at face value what they read because it's the NY Times (and largely proud of themselves for being 'informed' by such a reputable news source)?

A separate conversation for another thread, perhaps, though i'm sure a variation of this has already been covered here, and probably with better articulation than my free association.
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Feb 04, 2021 7:00 pm

.

...after YouTube pulled video from his own channel featuring footage of the January 6 event for violating the platform’s policies against “spam and deceptive practices,” Chariton reversed his position.


In a subsequent interview, the journalist noted that the purge of right-wing content was merely an excuse for YouTube to “get rid of” all content that questioned the consensus on subjects such as healthcare or U.S. foreign policy.


Image
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Feb 13, 2021 12:12 am

.

Tangentially related ("Big Tech")


https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is- ... ent-op-85e


Signal is a government op

Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. It is not your friend.


Signal — the privacy chat app favored by the world’s leading crypto experts — is trending again. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s MAGA Maidan Internet purge (which was followed by Facebook’s announcement that it was gonna start siphoning data off its WhatsApp property), Signal shot up to being the top downloaded messenger app on the planet.

The New York Times is writing about it. Edward Snowden is tweeting about it, telling his fans that Signal is the only reason he’s able to stay alive (and not the fact that he’s being protected round-the-clock by Russia’s security apparatus.) Hell, Even Elon Musk is out there telling people to go Signal. So many people are flooding the app that it’s been crashing.

Given that the app is blowing up, I figure it’s a good time to roll out my periodic public service announcement: Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. Yes, a CIA spinoff. Signal is not your friend.

Here are the cold hard facts.

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by “Moxie Marlinspike,” a tall, lanky cryptographer who has a head full of dreadlocks and likes to surf and sail his boat. Moxie was an old friend of Tor’s now-banished chief radical promotor Jacob Appelbaum, and he’s played a similar fake-radical game — although he’s never been able to match Jake’s raw talent and dedication to the art of the con. Still, Moxie wraps himself in air of danger and mystery and hassles reporters about not divulging any personal information, not even his age. He constantly talks up his fear of Big Brother and tells stories about his FBI file.

So how big a threat is Moxie to the federal government?

This big: After selling his encryption start-up to Twitter in 2011, Moxie began partnering with America’s soft-power regime change apparatus — including the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now called the U.S. Agency for Global Media) — on developing tech to fight Internet censorship abroad. That relationship led to his next venture: a suite of government-funded encrypted chat and voice mobile apps. Say hello to Signal.

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If you look at Signal’s website today, you’ll find all sorts of celebrity endorsements — Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and even Jack Dorsey. You’ll also find a “donate” button — which, by the way, you shouldn’t press because Signal has plenty of tech oligarch cash on hand these days. What you won’t find is an “about” section that explains Signal’s origin story — a story that involves several million dollars in seed and development capital from Radio Free Asia, a CIA spinoff whose history goes back to 1951 and involves all sorts of weird shit, including its association in the 1970s with the Moonies, the hardcore anti-communist Korean cult.

Exactly how much cash Signal got from the U.S. government is hard to gauge, as Moxie and Open Whisper System have been opaque about the sources of Signal’s funding. But if you tally up the information that’s been publicly released by the Open Technology Fund, the Radio Free Asia conduit that funded Signal, we know that Moxie’s outfit received at least $3 million over the span of four years — from 2013 through 2016. That’s the minimum Signal got from the feds.

Three mil might not seem like much these days, especially because Signal recently got a huge infusion of WhatsApp oligarch cash to keep its operation going. But it’s important to know that without this early U.S. government seed money, there would be no Signal today. And that makes you think: If Signal’s super crypto tech truly posed a threat to the feds and to our oligarchy’s power, why would the feds bankroll its creation? And why would Facebook and Google rush to adopt its super-secure protocols? H’mmmmm…

As you can see from the way Parler was shutdown last week — when our imperial oligarchy wants to cancel an app, it can do so instantly and with a vengeance. But Signal lives on and thrives, despite it being a supposed threat to the almighty surveillance powers of the United States of America.

Image

What is Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund? And why would the U.S government fund crypto tech like Signal? On top of that, why would Silicon Valley — built as it is on for-profit surveillance — embrace Signal’s supposedly unbreakable privacy tech?



[Seems Spiro already posted this on page 4... I'll leave it here anyway]
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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:46 pm

.

This probably should have been placed here instead:

Belligerent Savant » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:01 pm wrote:.

https://www.aier.org/article/twitter-ce ... kulldorff/


Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff

March 29, 2021

We’ve been witness to Twitter censorship for more than a year, beginning with obviously objectionable extremists then gradually moving to silence people based on merely having an opinion that contradicts lockdown orthodoxy. There have been days when I wondered whether I would cross the invisible line and even whether AIER would itself be silenced. Stanford public health expert Scott Atlas has been censored, and Naomi Wolf, visiting senior fellow at AIER, was put in Twitter jail for a week for landing on the wrong side of the high priests of allowable content.

Well, a new line has been crossed. Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff and co-creator of the Great Barrington Declaration, one of the most cited epidemiologists and infectious -disease experts in the world (latest count of citations: 25,290) has been censored by Twitter. His tweet on how not everyone needs a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was not taken down. He had a warning slapped on it and users have been prevented from liking or retweeting the post.

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Here is what he wrote without the warning slapped in front of it:

Image

Keep in mind, too, that Dr. Kulldorff serves on the Covid-19 vaccine safety subgroup that the CDC, NIH, and FDA rely upon for technical expertise on this very subject.

So here we have some geeks at Twitter curating science, in areas totally outside the specialization of web nerds, in a way that skews public understanding of the scientific debate. Dr. Kulldorff’s censorship directly coincides with Anthony Fauci making a political push to retain social distancing and mask restrictions and forced separation for children until they are vaccinated. He was all over Sunday TV shows doing that.

This attempt to silence accredited experts completely distorts the process of scientific inquiry, discovery, and public opinion. And to what end? Twitter has generally been biased in a lockdown direction. If you want to be cynical about it, you could observe that everyone who works there can get by on laptops and houseshoes for the duration.

Its stock price has more than doubled in the course of lockdowns and user engagement has risen dramatically.

It would appear that with this latest act of censorship – we are not talking about political extremism or anything else that violates normal terms of use – we have entered into a new realm. Twitter is now curating the scientific debate in ways that exclude alternative points of view, particularly those that raise doubts about the need for universalized vaccines and vaccine passports. To be sure, Dr. Kulldorff is not an anti-vaxxer (why should I have to say that?) but instead has a nuanced position in light of his professional understanding of the demographics of risk of this virus.

If there ever was a troubling sign of the power and arrogance of big tech, of which I’ve long been a defender, this new action is it. Dr. Kulldorff has been a brave proponent of traditional public health in the midst of an unprecedented and very obviously failed policy of lockdowns. He has been a voice of clarity, reason, calm, and science. That Twitter would choose to use its power over public debate to silence his insights should be of profound concern to everyone concerned about the use of science in the public interest.

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Re: Parler, Big Tech, Debate on Online Speech

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:42 am

.

Insidious, indeed.


Video: Roger Waters Tells “Little Prick” Zuckerberg To “F*** Off” Following Request To Use Iconic Pink Floyd Song For Ad

Pink Floyd song writer Roger Waters slammed Mark Zuckerberg during a press conference recently, announcing that the Facebook owner had offered a “huge, huge amount of money” to use the iconic song Another Brick In The Wall Part II in an advert for Instagram.

Speaking at an event to raise awareness about imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Waters noted the deep deep irony of Facebook wanting to buy and use a song that rails against ‘thought control’ and mindless conformity.

Waters described the development as part of Zuckerberg’s “insidious movement… to take over absolutely everything.”

Waters read out Facebook’s request, which noted “We want to thank you for considering this project. We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and so necessary today, which speaks to how timeless the work is.”

“And yet, they want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram more powerful than it already is,” Waters urged, adding “so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out into the general public so the general public can go, ‘What? No. No More.’”

“So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and the answer is, ‘f**k you! No f**king way!’,” Waters boomed to rapturous applause.

“I will not be a party to this bullsh-t, Zuckerberg,” Waters added.


He then asked “How did this little pr**k, who started off going, ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a four out of five. She’s ugly, we’ll give her a one’… How the f**k did he get any power in anything?”

“And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world,” Waters emphasised.

Following media attention, Waters requested trolls to pile on and call him a hypocrite for posting the video on “Zuckerberg’s crappy censored platform”:

@rogerwaters
.@petercronau, thank you for paying attention brother. Calling all trolls, come on you pricks, call me a hypocrite for posting this on Zuckerberg’s crappy censored platform @Facebook now.

Peter Cronau
@PeterCronau
"Fuck off!": says Pink Floyd’s @rogerwaters to Mark Zuckerberg.
After being offered "a large amount of money" to allow the use of ‘Another Brick in the Wall” to promote Instagram & Facebook.
Speaking at another ‘Free Assange’ forum.
@Wikileaks #Assange
#VideosLaJornada #auspol https://twitter.com/lajornadaonlin


https://twitter.com/rogerwaters/status/ ... 71024?s=20







https://summit.news/2021/06/15/video-ro ... ng-for-ad/
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