[ April 24, 2024 ]
Their turn will come. And there will be no one to speak for them.
Media Cheers Government Censorship Of Internet
By Daniel Greenfield, Freedom Outpost, May 1, 2019:
Story continues below advertisementAfter Muslim terrorists murdered hundreds of Christians, the Sri Lankan government responded, as it had during clashes between Muslims and Buddhists last year, by shutting down social media.
The Sri Lankan government’s justification for the shutdown was that “false news reports” were being spread through social media. This excuse closely echoed the argument that the media in the United States had been making in its push for censoring Facebook after Trump’s victory to fight “fake news”.
If anyone thought that the media would react critically to a foreign government that ranks near the bottom in press freedom silencing social media, including citizen journalists, they were very wrong.
“Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. My First Thought Was ‘Good.’” the headline of a New York Times op-ed blared. “Sri Lanka social media shutdown reveals Facebook’s Achilles’ heel,” the Washington Post echoed. The theme of both major media pieces was that social media was dangerous and that government shutdowns of free expression might be necessary to keep people safe from “extremism”.
“Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them,” Kara Swisher of Recode ranted in her Times op-ed defending Sri Lankan government censorship.
Swisher’s Recode site also published its own post, “Sri Lanka blocks social media: shutdown shows Facebook can’t be trusted”. An actual journalist would have argued that a government shutdown of free expression shows that the government can’t be trusted. It wasn’t Facebook that failed in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government had received warnings about an incoming attack and had failed to act.
The shutdown of social media prevented the spread of information damaging to the government.
No lives were being saved by shutting down social media. Any Muslim terror plotters already had their orders. And would have been able to bypass the ban using VPN. Christians are a tiny minority and were not about to take to the streets. The shutdown prevented Sri Lankans in their own country and abroad from quickly getting in touch with their loved ones. And limited public criticism of the government.
The Sri Lankan defense ministry already announced why it was blocking social media. And it isn’t to save lives. “Currently, the security sections are conducting investigations in a broad manner on these incidents and the government has taken steps to temporarily block all the social media avenues until the investigations are concluded,” its statement reads.
The military is blocking people from expressing their opinions until it finalizes its story and presents it officially to the public. And this is what our own media supports and wants to see in America.
The issue isn’t whether Facebook can be trusted. It’s whether the media trusts the people.
“Social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check. These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent,” Swisher writes.
Giving voice to everyone is the essence of free speech. And that’s what the media opposes.
The media has tried to spin internet censorship, in this country or in Sri Lanka, as an urgent response to a crisis. The Sri Lankan government, Cat Zakrzewski at the Washington Post claimed, “made a unilateral decision: The risks from rampant misinformation and fake news on these platforms were greater than the communications benefits these channels could bring during a crisis.”
The risks from “misinformation” and “fake news” are political. Censorship is a political solution.
Democracy does indeed die in darkness. And the darkness is the flow of black ink spilling from The Post.
There are occasional times when censorship can save lives, and those almost always involve revealing military secrets and law enforcement plans, behavior that our own media happily engages in.
If President Trump told the New York Times or the Washington Post that they couldn’t print leaked plans for destroying Iran’s nuclear program, they, and the rest of the media would wrap their thousand-dollar suits and power suits in the First Amendment and cry that they are being censored by a tyrant. But they cheer a government shutdown of social media as an urgent response to the crisis of free speech.
“A few years ago we’d view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat,” Ivan Sigal, the executive director of Global Voices, tweeted.
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13 Comments
4 years ago
Wrong, Pam. Social media will be turned back on, later. Would you like to help start fighting Daesh on the internet every day like others do? There are at least 150 Daesh accounts on Twitter right now, for example. Twitter can’t find them on their own and it takes fingertips on the mice to get them reported. And that’s just Twitter. In any case, Sri Lanka needs them all handled immediately to disrupt communications in this war. http://twinkie.g01m.rocks/i/t/dh/2017071005.html
4 years ago
Reply to
Sara Eades
So everyone should suffer because they can’t get to Islamic terrorists accounts that have been there prior to the Sri Lanka attacks? So all accounts must be shut down. LOL!
http://iranpoliticsclub.net/cartoons/cyber-censor/images/social-media-islam-internet-censorship-cartoon.jpg
4 years ago
Reply to
Sara Eades
Um the 300 Christians have already been slaughtered in Sri Lanka. Shutting down social media now isn’t going to help them or the 70,000 Nigerian Christians already slaughtered by f’ing muslums that have nothing to do w/Daesh whatsoever except their religion.
4 years ago
For more HATRED, tune into MEMRI TV.
Youtube has no problem with MEMRI but often has problems with Dennis Prager Univeristy videos that are conservative. At MEMRI you can get your daily dose of Islamic hatred.
4 years ago
4 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
Censorship is the ultimate objective of the Democrats and other Fascist based governments throughout the West’s faux-Democracies. Obama, a Muslim, of this there is no doubt, was and is a proponent of denying one’s individual liberties, Constitutional Rights, the exception being, those of the Leftist/Islamic movement or enterprise. The latter meaning, totalitarianism. They, the Obamaites, are intolerant of diversity of politics, religion, race, precisely Conservatism, Judaism, Christianity, and others that do not align with their autocratic, totalitarian doctrine. Globalism is, also, an adversary of one’s Constitutional or Charter of Rights; Collectivism, the alleged global village dogma that was lauded by another of Obama’s acolytes, Hillary Clinton.
The privileged and elitists of the Leftist-Fascist disorder appeal to those who fear or detest individualism, as it is less complicated not holding personal accountability for one’s life. Thus, let those, the Overlords of the collective, the village pilot the proletariat’s’ lives from A to Z. Those of us who balk at the collective worldview will be denounced to become the disenfranchised, outsiders, aliens, or the Leftist-Fascists’ illegals. These detractors the Collectivist mandate may lose citizenship status or face re-education camps. The latter exists today throughout America’s and the West’s education system. Mad Bernie is a proponent and advocate of Collectivism; he is what one may call a disaffected, elitist, and privileged
old but extremely, wealthy Hippy.
4 years ago
It’s just fear of effective competition and their inner fascism showing. They long for the days when they could firewall all information and control the agenda…
4 years ago
Slightly off topic but part of the bigger plan for us –
Do you want a glimpse into the bigger grand plan for us… pay attention to South African politics. Communists abhor the idea of private property ownership right and white people. Obama tried to do what he could to minimize private property right. Remember the Cliven Bundy? This is why George Bush in Texas pretends to like Trump because he heads the Bureau of Land Management.
Bureau of Land Management Lied About Cliven Bundy’s $1M in Fines
(A eventually is was decided in Budny’s favor)
…
The Bundy family has owned and minded this ranch since Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. To give you an idea of the ranch, it is a vast sprawling piece of land and by eminent domain rights in Nevada, legally, the Bundy family has a right to allow its cattle to graze that plot. After all, 150 years of possession should be more than enough of a claim to a piece of land that is not really used for any other reason but ranching.
…
Enter Barack Hussein Obama. Shortly before he left office, he opted to forego eminent domain rights and signed an order (extra-Constitutionally, I might add…read: ILLEGAL) that the Bundy land and hundreds of miles around it were to be saved for the redesignation of a national monument. You read that right. They stole the Bundy land.
…
http://www.truthandaction.org/bureau-of-land-management-lied-about-cliven-bundys-1m-in-fines/
De Blasio Rails Against Concept of Private Property, Says It Impedes NYC’s ‘Socialistic Impulse’
By: Alex Griswold
September 6, 2017 10:34 am
…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D.) said in a new interview that if he had his way, the law would be less protective of private property and strip it away as needed to serve “socialistic” needs.
“In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?” New York magazine asked de Blasio in a story published Monday.
“What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property,” de Blasio responded.
The Democratic mayor continued to say that if he had it his way, the government would decide
“which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be.”
“I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” he added. “Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.”
…
https://freebeacon.com/politics/de-blasio-rails-against-concept-private-property/
4 years ago
The Sri-Lankan government is result oriented. When dealing with the Tamil Tigers they finally solved the decades old problem by liquidating any and all Tamil Tiger leadership.
The Sr Lankan people are 70% Buddhist and Shiite Muslims are behind the bombings. None are going to be taken alive as the governemtn hunts them down. The Shiites plan was to kill Christian first and next the Buddhists – so now it’s payback to eliminate the ISIS Muslims and anyone related to them. Social Media would only interfere and besides the country is under Martial Law.
This is the same problem in Myamar? Burma – the Rohinga Muslim were killing off entire villages. Buddhist monks went to he villages to inquire why there were no Alms being donated only to discover Buddhist houses now occupied by Muslims – the Buddhists owners had been murdered by the Muslim occupiers.
So the Muslims were driven form the country back into Pakistan and the MSM doesn’t want to know what the Muslims did to deserve it.
Getting rid of Isis types is only made more difficult with social media and Leftist screaming declaring martial law helps the process and social media is shut down.
Buddhist Sri Lanka and Buddhist Myamar are fighting a war with Islam the way it needs to be fought.
The problem with the outside west is that they still do not believe there is a war.
4 years ago
Maybe the didn’t want people to find out the REAL TRUTH. The government didn’t do it’s job. Imagine if the people found this out?
Sri Lanka being ruled by LIARS. Most TURD world countries are. In America, we barely escape it ourselves.
