Elon Musk has been accused of hypocrisy for publicly defying the EU’s demands that he comply with the Digital Safety Act, while also flagging or removing posts that fall foul of the new DSA rules. Nevertheless, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd, at least Musk is drawing attention to the EU’s censorship programme.
Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.
More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.
There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.
It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.
It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.
Worth reading in full.
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Not a bad effort Mr Farzi but there was no pandemic.
In reality there really was.
But it was only one of fear, deliberately promulgated by the RPTB.
Precisely why they did this is the question.
Obvious answer is to enable them to remain at the top.
Fractonal banking is dead.
So they need scapegoats, step forward Putin.
“Russia will no longer be beholden to the Rothschilds of this world”
The horrible reality is that the end goal is massive depopulation. I have been posting about this for many months.
You have indeed posted about that a lot. It is informative though that the third world (Africa) is where birth rates are highest. Once poor people become more prosperous though they start to get better educated, they begin to live more organised lives, they have access to contraception, water and proper sanitation, and eventually birth rates fall to levels seen in the prosperous west.
—–Ofcourse there is only one way poor countries can develop their economies and become prosperous and that is by using the same fuels as we did (coal oil and gas), but absurd energy policies all emanating from the UN that coerce these poor people trying to live on a dollar a day into leaving their fossil fuels in the ground and fobbing them off with some monies for turbines and solar panels is preventing that development and therefore preventing birth rates from falling. If the only goal is “depopulation” then allowing these people to use their natural resources seems a no brainer, but there are more forces at work and to wealthy so called environmentalists in the wealthy west there is nothing more worrying than poor Africans getting the same standard of living as them and using up the world’s finite resources in the ground.
Across Britain, in fact, across the West the Overton Window has been influenced mainly by Arts, Humanities and Social Science graduates. Accumulated in the state sector, Academia, Quangos, Charities and other government funded bodies, they ask for money in return for aspirational ideas. Many of these ideas don’t work as expected, like the NET Zero policies, and those headlined, daily, here, because those involved lack the knowledge to throw out the impossible and highly improbable suggestions.
This has created dissatisfaction, with the obvious changes requiring STEM expertise, Crafts, and skilled labour in general, coupled with Business experience to implement them, yet they are excluded from exerting any influence.
I see interesting times ahead.
Alas, looking around at the mindless blobs that make up the majority, I find that an attractive proposition.
The EU is basically becoming a new, more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union. A totalitarian society governed by technocrats and bureaucrats.
It’s really not much of an exaggeration.
I can see someone objecting on the grounds that it has private property where the USSR had none.
But it’s largely the illusion of private property.
First off, anything you own you have to pay taxes on, in many cases substantial amounts. So at best you’re a co-owner.
Anything you own is subjected to massive amounts of regulation. On how you use it, how you have to run it, if it’s a business, how you have to maintain it if it’s a valuable item like a house or a car.
Whenever they want they impose new rules which can make your property valueless. For example, if properties don’t meet certain environmental standards they don’t get a certain certification and without the certification you can’t sell it.
Or a car, which you thought you could drive anywhere now you can’t drive to certain places because it’s too old. Or you can’t park it.
Banks will ask you what you are spending your money on before they allow you to make a transfer.
In modern societies like the EU and Britain we don’t really own anything. We have temporary custody and consumption rights which can be changed or revoked at any time by unelected bureaucrats and technocrats.
This is just the last stage. They’re now taking away the right to complain and challenge.
The transformation to neo-soviet rule is almost complete.
It’s the difference between Socialism and Fascism.
For those living under it, there isn’t much of a difference.
Socialism and Fascism, the obverse and reverse of the same.
The difference between Socialism and Fascism is the difference between potayto and potahto.
Both grow on the same roots: empowerment of the State over the individual; central economic planning and control.
Socialism requires State-ownership of economic resources, Fascism gives the appearance of private ownership of economic resources, but they must be used as directed by the State. Same thing in practice.
The architects of the EU (1992) via the EEC (1958) via the European Coal & Steel Community (1952) were the bureaucrats who ran the governments in the 1930s and during the war in National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Vichy France and of course ran those ‘democratic’ governments post-war because there was nobody else who could.
They of course selected and trained their heirs and successors.
That the EU and our Governments are technocratic, State directed should be a surprise to no one.
The UK at the end of the war was the outlier, but joining the EEC in 1973 soon brought us into alignment. Our escape has been short-lived as Benito Starmer is selling us back into bondage for his 30 pieces of silver.
The architects of the EU (1992) via the EEC (1958) via the European Coal & Steel Community (1952) were the bureaucrats who ran the governments in the 1930s and during the war in National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Vichy France and of course ran those ‘democratic’ governments post-war because there was nobody else who could.
This is wrong, The architects of the European Coal & Steel Community were Konrad Adenauer and Rober Schuman and their shared goal was a western German satellite state of France, something Adenauer already briefly aspired to after the first world war when he was part of the so-called Rhenish separatists, except that he was cunning enough to cut his ties with them before their attempted coups floundered due to only lukewarm support by the French occupation forces.
That the majority of the administrative apparatus of France, Germany and Italy survived two world wars largely intact and served whatever the government of the day happened to be is certainly correct. But that’s so trivial that it’s not really worthy of being mentioned.
Liberal-democracy. Voting isn’t democracy. Voting concentrates power in one place instead of it being dispersed so nobody has more power than any other.
Concentrated power = tyranny. Tyranny is not liberal, it’s still tyranny, and worse if it is tyranny of the majority. “Democracy” and throwing ‘liberal’ or ‘social’ in front of the word is just to cover up its true nature.
In a liberal society, there would be no voting, no political gangs wanting a bigger share of the tax plunder and to impose their nonsense on others, just inter-dependent people co-operating out of mutual interest and for mutual benefit, which is what folk do if left alone by Government.
It’s what our ancestors did. We should try it again.
This might be what someone believes his American ancestors did in the so-called wild west during most of the 19th century. Other accomplishments of the people would be building lots of better wooden sheds they called houses for some reason. It’s not what anybody else’s ancestors have been doing in the the about 7500 hundred years of human history outside of the USA.