The infamy of the almost omnipotent digital censors
- Amazon (*1994) turned off Parler’s (*2018) server in January 2021.
- Google (*1998) swallowed YouTube (*2005) in November 2006.
- Wikipedia (*2001) was hijacked by a transatlantic junta starting ~2005.
- Facebook (*2004) swallowed Instagram (*2010) in 2012.
- Twitter (*2006) influenced the outcome of the 2020 U.S. election, permanently locking the Twitter account of 88 million contacts of Republican president Donald Trump in January 2021.
- Quora (*2009), founded by two former Facebook employees, censors opinions that deviate from the thumped in narrative of corporations, politics, and mainstream media.
Warning by German literature, culture and media scholar Prof. Joseph Vogl (*1957) in his radio interview Wie man Hass zu Geld macht [How to turn hate into money], presented by Deutschlandradio Kultur, March 14, 2021
“Money, power and influence are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few Internet and financial groups: they endanger democracy by systematically capitalizing on hostility.”
Coordinated corporate censorship is accelerating the end of democracy.
➤ YouTube deletes an ongoing live interview with German Corona measures-critical World Cup soccer player Thomas Berthold. (April 3, 2021)
➤ Just a few months before the German federal election in September 2021, YouTube unlawfully blocked the channels of three high-reach government critics: Boris Reitschuster[*], Gunnar Kaiser and Markus Gärtner/Max Otte (Politik Spezial).
[*] During the 1-week block, Reitschuster’s channel had 810,446 views, 78,046 hours of playback time, and gained 4,481 new subscribers. The muzzle strategy failed.
➤ Between January 26, 2021, and the end of March, an unnamed author collected data on YouTube’s left-leaning presidential deletion policy and published it on the website 81m.org. 300 White House videos featuring and about media-digital-financial-elect US president Biden received nearly 3.7 million negative ratings. The Biden-favoring YouTube platform “corrected” popular opinion by removing 2.5 million negative ratings (nearly 8,000 per video). The dislike deletions occured partly at hourly intervals and partly en masse.
➤ YouTube deletes videos about studies by Harvard, Oxford and Stanford universities via YouTube as subject to censorship.
➤ Twitter bans the publication of a YouTube video about Stanford face mask study (published on ScienceDirect).
➤ Facebook automatically deletes articles from the German news magazine focus and engages in digital erasure of certain names. Affected are the far-right activists Tommy Robinson (GB) and Martin Sellner (Austria, IBÖ spokesman).
Social divide and targeting the critics is a strategic component of the digitized plandemic. Corporate censorship is state censorship.
The [German] democracy movement, which has been opposing the panic driving political and media backed Covid war, i.e., the long-term coercive Corona measures, has gained a large following (some estimated 15–20% of the population) in the years 2020 and 2021. To discourage, dismiss and stop them, the delete buttons of Google, YouTube and social media platforms were and are running at full speed. Messages criticizing the “medical-bureaucratic” tyranny are eliminated. Strikingly, the hired fact-checkers are exclusively targeting and censoring critics of the concerted Covid-related restrictions. In the age of digitized political terror, we are witnessing the long-planned humiliation of people, the restriction of their fundamental rights, and the assault on their human dignity. Truth and facts that oppose the declared goal of digitization, the 4th industrial revolution, are meant to lose ground by means of censorship and accompanied immanent self-censorship.
On May 3, 2020, the Australian independent journalist and blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote in her blog article Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)
- Within 48 hours both Facebook and then YouTube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” […]
Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.
On March 14, 2021, liberal literary scholar and political activist Naomi Wolf (*1962) discussed both the conditioning imposed by the digital censors and resulting obedient self-censorship. Her host was conservative Dinesh D’Souza (*1961), also censored, who posted the video interview The Evil Motives of the Digital Censors in Rumble:
- Now Twitter and Facebook are saying, ‘Look, we can boot all conservative voices.’ I am horrified to see the purge of conversatives, […] the conflation of conservative ideas with terrorism or insurrection[ists]. […] Unfortunately, the Big Tech companies are big donors to the Democrats. They’re in bed together. […] Where do we go? We need to create other platforms, other news outlets, other gathering places. Minute 6:21
By privatizing speech and giving it into the hands of these 4–6 tech bros they are able to and they are training us into what we can say and what we can’t say. There is a real conditioning aspect which is very disturbing to me. I get 3 strikes. Of course, that chills speech. […] It’s called prior restraint in civil rights law. I should — as a publisher, as a journalist, or as citizen — not be censoring myself in advance. […] By privatizing speech these tech companies can train me to censor myself and train you to censor yourself and demonstrate to everybody that they’d better be careful or they’d be in Twitter jail like [various public figures and Naomi Wolf herself]. Naomi Klein, minute 8:26
The German communication and media scientist Prof. Dr. Michael Meyen (*1967) was raised in East Germany (GDR). In November 2020 he was one of the guest speakers of the lecture series “Reflecting on Corona” presented by the adult education institute VHS Kolbermoor in Bavaria. In the run-up the corporate media (MSM) defamed two of the speakers, both non-system-conform academicians as “Corona deniers”. The Kolbermoor city council voted by a narrow majority (13 to 11) to permit Meyen to actually present his lecture on “The Failure of Journalism in the Corona Era.”
In his video interview “Die Macht der Medien” [The Power of the Media] with host Manuel Schönthaler of the independent press portal Frische Sicht on April 13, 2021, professor Meyen discussed the following topics, among others:
- How do regulators and discourse watchdogs clean up the media market in the background?
- What is behind the deletion policy and account suspensions on YouTube?
- How did Wikipedia manage to “sell” its content as truth?
- Why is it almost impossible to ignore the reality-defining power of the leading media (MSM)?
- What is the role of corporate media in regard to the alternative media outlets (independent opposition media)?
- To what extent does the [German] Federal Ministry of Health cooperate with Google to influence the population’s level of information?
- How do truth regimes dictate the orientation of the masses?
In his video interview “Technologischer Totalitarismus” [Technological Totalitarianism] on March 16, 2021 the German-American economist, fund manager and author Prof. Dr. Max Otte (*1964) shared with host Milena Preradovic:
- The world is changing. This often happens fundamentally every seventy years or so. This time, the fundamental changes in the entire world system even coincide roughly with the end of World War II. Minute 2:42
- According to Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates or digitalophile politicians, we are entering a very digitized system. Digitization is not yet politically under control. Very large power structures can emerge very quickly, such as Amazon, Alphabet [Google] and Twitter, which also massively influenced the last US election. Twitter put Twitter warnings under Donald Trump’s tweets. By blocking fact checkers, Trump’s vote was naturally sidetracked. These gigantic concentrations of power have great potential to steer opinion, or at least to channel opinion. Minute 4:23
- At the moment, Europe is hopelessly at the mercy of Google, Amazon, Apple and so on. These corporations hardly pay any taxes here and transfer the added value to the USA. This is all very worrying. China has its own big tech corporations and is, of course, also a surveillance state. That’s the direction things are going in the West right now, too. These are very powerful players. And politics, of course, is dominated by lobbying in many cases. It follows the lobby interests. In the financial crisis (2008), it was clearly financial market interests. Ten or twelve years ago Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) (2007–2008) confirmed that the financial industry had hijacked politics. Meanwhile we can say that Silicon Valley has also strongly hijacked politics. Massive influence is being exerted on president Biden, who is now in office, and his government team. Kamala Harris from California said months ago, ‘We’re not going after [refuse to regulate] the big Internet companies.’
Technological totalitarianism [surveillance capitalism], control of the big tech octopuses, was a very important issue on the left more than a decade ago. You don’t hear about that anymore. The corporations have become almost omnipotent. Minute 6:45 - Corporatism [the cronyism of corporations and hijacked politicians] is now turning against the people, against the common good, against the middle class. It leads to the fact that such an oligarch [like the ‘little emperor’ Bill Gates] can buy himself an incredible amount of power. He can prevent laws from being made that curtail his power. Then he becomes even more powerful. These are really devastating accumulations of power. Minute 10:11
The retired German philosopher and media and communication theorist Prof. Norbert Bolz (*1953) translates the newspeak phrase “Fight Against The Right” on Twitter on April 19, 2021:
The “fight against the right” is not directed against neo-Nazis, but against freedom of expression, moral realism and common sense.
The new masters of the world run the digital-financial complex.
Financial power and digital power = kingmaking global superpower.
In his video interview Das neue Geld kommt! [The new money is coming!] on March 25, 2021, the German financial expert, freelance journalist and author Ernst Wolff named the hyper-powerful string pullers who unduly restrict freedom of expression. They are the data and financial corporations: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Netflix and Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity.
- Unfortunately, most people today still wrongly assume that our fate is determined by politics. Last year [2020] showed quite clearly that this is not the case. Our fate is being decided by the digital-financial complex. And I count the very large digital corporations among them. That’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix. On the financial side, these are now — not the investment banks or the hedge funds as they used to be — but the very large asset management companies. These are BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity. These ten large corporations are at the top of the digital-financial complex. And they set the rules today, they decide everything today. Politicians are nothing more than puppets who carry out what is already being imposed on them by this financial-digital complex.
You could see this very clearly in the American election campaign, when suddenly Donald Trump was no longer allowed to appear on Twitter. […] No matter what you think of Donald Trump, it’s very interesting that the private corporation behind Twitter can turn off the tap of the supposedly most powerful man in the world, can deny the medium and practically restrict this person’s freedom of expression. Today, freedom of expression is no longer restricted only by the states, but by the large corporations that have usurped a power such as we have never seen before in history.
The big financial corporations have backed [the illegitimately elected] Biden this time. Minute 3:41 - No one has been able to stand up to the destruction of free speech by these big corporations. Minute 25:41
Putting digital censors in their place, German media lawyer Steinhöfel accuses “the automated mass destruction of free speech.”
- “Facebook is the most intransigent player I know.” Steinhöfel, minute 13:45
- “Facebook deletes with a political slant.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12.09.2018
Even before the Network Enforcement Act, set in motion by the German justice minister Heiko Maas, came into effect on October 1, 2017, smart media lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel criticized the NEA as “a frontal attack on freedom of expression” and an unconstitutional law to combat freedom of expression. He argues that the benefits of which do not outweigh the damage. Since then, he said, the German constitutional state no longer cares about “enforcing applicable law, since issues of freedom of expression are now no longer decided in court, but in the deletion centers of the IT giants.”
As a co-founder of the donation-funded initiative “Meinungsfreiheit im Netz” [Freedom of Expression on the Net], Steinhöfel has been fighting compliant and absurd deletions, account suspensions and misconduct by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WDR, Jerusalem Post, “Faktenchecker” and Correctiv gGmbH in 50 documented cases with a 95% success rate so far since 2018. The representative cases reveal that the fundamental right to freedom of expression is acutely endangered.
Commenting on the consequence of the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), the media-savvy publicist said:
- Voices critical of the government are silenced. ‘Correctiv’ and ‘dpa-Faktencheck’ act as self-appointed judges of truth on the net — with dire consequences.
Source: MMnews, January 5, 2020
On August 21, 2019 Steinhöfel set YouTube a deadline to restore the YouTube channel “neverforgetniki,” which had unlawfully been deleted without warning. In order to escape the announced judicial measures, the dominant video platform YouTube made the monetized channel of the young video blogger Niklas [Niki] Lotz afloat again the very next day. Niki’s “offense” was to have ostensibly criticized the concertedly hyped-up media darling Greta Thunberg with “hate speech.” In terms of the German criminal law, the vague term “hate speech” is not tenable.
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The above article was first published in German on the writer’s platform Publikum: Die Niedertracht der fast allmächtigen digitalen Zensoren, March 18, 2021