How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election – Scoop.co.nz

In what it calls an effort to make itself "a morereliable source for election-related news and information,"YouTube hasannounced that it will be removing "content thatcontains hacked information, the disclosure of which mayinterfere with democratic processes, such as elections andcensuses."

"For example, videos that contain hackedinformation about a political candidate shared with theintent to interfere in an election," adds the Google-ownedvideo sharingplatform.

IMPORTANT

YOUTUBEjust quietly announced they'll REMOVE "videos that containhacked information about a political candidate with theintent to interfere in an election" https://t.co/vum1y5c9ER

Rememberhow Wikileaks changed the game in 2016? Yeah, that's notallowed anymore. pic.twitter.com/dzt7WsOHKe

Memelord (@dailydigger19) August13, 2020

This by itself is analarming assault on human communication and press freedom.If there is authentic information out there about either ofthe candidates who are up for the most powerful electedposition on the planet, the world is entitled to know aboutit, regardless of how that information was acquired.Monopolistic tech oligarchs have no business barring us fromlearning about and discussing thatinformation.

Immensely powerful people should not bepermitted to have secrets from the public anyway. The amountof power one has should be directly inverse to the amount ofsecrecy they are permitted to have. If you're anywhere nearthe presidency of the United States of America, the secrecyyou are entitled to should be zero.

If a hacker isable to get a hold of accurate information about DonaldTrump or Joe Biden, that information is ours. We're entitledto it. Anyone who tries to obstruct our access to thatinformation is stealing from us. It's absolutely ridiculousthat we have a society where people are permitted to bothrule over us and keep secrets from us as it is without government-alignedtech plutocrats silencing our attempts to learn what thosesecrets might be.

Moreover, no YouTube moderator willbe in any position to definitively say whether mostinformation that comes out is hacked. They'd only be able todo what the mass media did with the 2016 WikiLeaks drops andcite unproven assertions by opaque intelligence agencies whohave a proven track record of lying, assertions which turnedout to be far more dubious than most Americans realize.Documents or video could be leaked about a candidate and USintelligence agencies could just declare it a "hack" andhave any YouTube videos about it immediatelycensored.

As Alan MacLeod explainsfor MintPress News:

"[T]hegreat majority of leaked information the lifeblood ofinvestigative journalism is anonymous. Often, like inthe cases of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or RealityWinner, whistleblowers face serious consequences if theirnames become attached to documents exposing government orcorporate malfeasance. But without a name to go with adocument, the difference between leaked data and hacked datais impossible to define. Thus, powerful people andorganizations could claim data was hacked, rather thanleaked, and simply block all discussion of the matter on theplatform."

'Discussionof Wikileaks or any Hacked Information Banned UnderNew YouTube Rules' | @AlanRMacLeodfor @MintPressNewshttps://t.co/IXt8oFImPy

Courage Foundation (@couragefound) August14, 2020

So this in and of itselfis an outrage. But the way things are playing out it couldwind up being a lot worse if damning information about acandidate surfaces prior to the November election.

Wealready know from experience that social media giants tendto follow in each other's footsteps whenever there's asignificant step in the direction of censorship, like theircoordinated cross-platform removals of alternativemedia outlets, accountsfrom US-targeted nations, and peoplewho have been labeled "conspiracytheorists".

So there's already reason to beconcerned that YouTube's new attack on press freedoms willspread to social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.Add in the fact that these platforms are openly coordinatingwith each other and with the US government to silence speechdeemed "online meddling" and "election interference" and itlooks a lot more likely.

The New York Times published an article onWednesday titled "Google, Facebook and Others Form TechCoalition to Secure U.S. Election", laterchanged to "Google, Facebook and Others Broaden Group toSecure U.S. Election".

"Facebook, Google and othermajor tech companies said on Wednesday that they had addednew partners and met with government agencies in theirefforts to secure the November election," NYT reports. "Thegroup, which is seeking to prevent the kind of onlinemeddling and foreign interference that sullied the 2016presidential election, previously consisted of some of thelarge social media firms, including Twitter and Microsoft inaddition to Facebook and Google. Among the new participantsis the WikimediaFoundation."

Monopolistic techcompanies which collaborate in unison with governmentagencies to prevent unauthorized narratives from circulatingon the internet are conducting state censorship. Own it.pic.twitter.com/mhtuENkeyx

Caitlin Johnstone

(@caitoz) August13, 2020

So if informationemerges about a candidate in an "October surprise" in a waythat can be credibly spun as a "hack" like the 2016WikiLeaks drops were, it's entirely likely that we will seesome interference in people's ability to communicate aboutit on not just one but multiple social media platforms. Howmuch communication interference we'd be subjected to isunknown at this time, but it certainly looks like there aremeasures in place to at least implement some under certaincircumstances.

Imagine if documents or video footagewere posted online somewhere and we'd get blocked fromsharing its URLs on Facebook or suspended for postingscreenshots of it on Twitter. The way iron-fisted censorshippractices are already unfolding, it's a possibility thatlooks not at all remote.

Anyway, something to be onalertfor.

Scoop Media

Rogue journalist

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

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How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election - Scoop.co.nz