Antisocial media censorship is having a truly devastating effect. Nowadays, the livelihoods of the masses are tied to the possibility of appearing and interacting on these surfaces. As analog media is on its way to lose relevance, even most manual workers who do not require a computer cannot afford not to maintain at least one website or Facebook page to promote their activities.
Our lives are so intertwined with the Internet that it’s a fatal tragedy for many if they are banned or blocked by powerful censors or stray algorithms.
Tyranny = profit. Freedom = bankruptcy.
Traditional censorship means the elimination of information that is not to the liking of the various spheres of power, or the prohibition of its reproduction, often under the threat of severe punishment. In the online arena, it is also possible for a given power to demand the immediate removal of knowledge material it does not like, which dictate is carried out by operators who fear their gigaprofits.
But online censorship does not stop here. It shows quite a lot of variety in two directions compared to traditional prohibition mechanisms. On the one hand, there are much more devious – sometimes even completely invisible – methods of implementing censorship. On the other hand, while mostly absolutist rulers and party states of the past demanded limitless totalitarian censorship, nowadays companies and even individuals have joined the process!
Companies whose value judgment is that a given social media platform does not apply content filtering carried out with sufficient rigor, withdraw their support from the website. In the wake of missed advertising revenues and publicly announced boycotts, the media which refuses to enforce this kind of dictatorship suffers mercilessly from its disobedience.
In order to avoid the almost certain bankruptcy, they must take into account the various requirements of many thousands of financial dictators. Under such circumstances, a healthy compromise is only possible if the platform incorporates all capital-backed claims into its terms of use. In other words, it creates an extremely strict, complicated, opaque and inconsistent censorship machine.
Dictatorship of individuals
The process does not stop there, as certain individuals – especially billionaires and celebrities – may also imagine themselves as little kings if they have a huge number of followers. They generate the traffic that can be exchanged for money on their fanpages. Therefore, they too want to have a say in the operation of the censorship machine. They can demand with poppy-red heads that persons and organizations expressing opinions they do not like shall be banned, their own livelihoods and sponsorship income shall cease.
Entire existences are being destroyed by a dictatorship whose terms of use change from week to week according to current profit interests. What didn’t cause any offense yesterday is a thought to be thrown into the bonfire from today.
The livelihoods of the masses will be rendered impossible due to this ad hoc terror, who will not able to recoup their losses as they have relied on a centralized cansorship machine for the promotion of their business. Their accusation is in one person their verdict.
An individual dictatorship is even worse than central party-state terror as no one may know for sure which one of the millions of people to be reached gets offended from a post and why. Cancel culture refers to a dictatorship where, without any kind of trial, court ruling, or even a simple legal remedy, it’s possible to erase traces to the mere existence of another person based on the reasoning that its functioning harms the psyche of individualistic dictators.
A single aggressive Karen suffering from a multitude of mental disorders can override the interests of millions of fans and followers, and prevent information of interest to the masses from spreading.
This is how mental illness takes over the world. Insanity becomes normality and normality becomes insanity.
Algorithmic control – the invisible dictatorship that diverts you from the path of cognition
We don’t necessarily need to be in the spotlight and gather a huge fan base to cease the right to exist.
The primary basic method of internet censorship is algorithmic control. Algorithms constantly collect the interactions of billions of users (big data). Running them through various analysis software, they determine what kind of content consumers might want to see. There is also a more personal level of algorithmic mastery, where they try to place relevant content in front of users based on their past searches.
The algorithm, although seemingly neutral object at first glance, has absolute control over the minds and tastes of users in a completely invisible way. Since they are man-made automatisms, algorithms necessarily show a bias towards the tastes and mindsets of the engineers who programmed them. A person’s fundamentally complex interests can easily be narrowed down so that a primitive algorithm operating solely on the principle of quantity can process and then profile their tastes.
Google, YouTube, and all other content delivery platforms with search function provide us with results that the majority of people are curious about based on the law of large numbers. The users may try to refine or concretize their search terms, but most of them still can’t use Google and its peers professionally. They search for generic terms, which action reduces the amount of content they see to the same few sources, even to a millionth of existing and available web pages.
The remaining body of knowledge, which is practically never presented, can be hidden from prying eyes forever. There’s no factual banning or blocking of eye-opening information, instead no one is given the opportunity to reach it. Users are given the illusion of unrestricted choice and freedom while they languish in the matrix with millions of like-minded, scammed companions.
Information world war for subjugation of the mind
Once we have seen that algorithms don’t actually exist to serve our tastes, but to reprogram our minds, the next level on the frontline of the information war can be reached by those who, despite algorithmic manipulation, do not transform into androids, but remain human beings, chasing the truth until they find it.
Algorithms may hide liberating information, but they don’t block access. If we know exactly where to look, the veil of algorithmic fog can be removed from our eyes.
This is when the miracle weapon of online platforms, digital censorship, must be put into practice. If the spread of information cannot be prevented by algorithms as too many people see the truth in it and are therefore happy to share it with their fellow human beings, there is no other chance left but to deploy the heavy artillery, namely the Bangladeshi clickfarm workers.
In the name of resource efficiency, the live censorship machine mostly strikes only if we gain relative popularity with our content. Many people fall into this trap: they see that at first there are no consequences for their actions, so they get presumptuous and begin to proclaim their own agenda with unpleasant vehemence. They spend months or years expanding aggressively, mostly undisturbed, then, in the blink of an eye, they get struck with the banhammer. Having managed to gather a wide fan base, years of persistent hard work and sacrifice disappear forever.
Guilt without sin, conviction without trial
The discreet charm of online dictatorship is that censorship is mostly activated only after a person has a fairly large number of visitors. Until then, mostly monitoring and criminal registration is taking place. There are of course exceptions – e.g. paedophile content is cruelly and immediately deleted after discovery, and the secret services are also up to the issue – but companies use the tactic of wait-and-see regarding expressing simple opinions. They wait patiently until offended users begin to report the page.
We can see that there’s absolutely no actual crime in question. When a crime occurs, everyone is obliged by law to prevent it from unfolding or to report it to the authorities, depending on their possibilities, even at the moment of being caught in the act. You shouldn’t have to wait for someone to gain hundreds of thousands of followers before they can be finally removed from the public’s eye.
This method of censorship serves a double purpose. It entrusts the process to the judgment of the people (see the Pilate story), and in the long run, it demoralizes and ruins the victim, who may have put many years of work into building up his own small empire. It’s not necessary to pulverize those who are objectively and legally guilty, but whose existence disturbs certain circles of interest.
Speaking of Pilate, let’s examine carefully why this process is appropriate for the legislative power. Jesus, who was dragged before the judgment seat of the governor Pilate by the Pharisaic Jews, objectively did not commit any sin. Moreover, Pilate himself acquits him of all charges. However, the crowd demands the killing of Jesus and the release of the rebellious murderer named Barabash. Pilate, washing his hands, says: the frenzied judgment of the crowd overrides the laws carved in stone. Therefore, here and now, I am forced to hand over the innocent to the people’s judgment, who scandalized the Pharisaic Jews by speaking the truth.
Entrusting the process of judgment to the masses frees power from the voices that can challenge its legitimacy by conflating innocence with guilt. Two types of people are always locked up in jail: deadly offenders, who pose systemic risks, and innocent people, who also pose systemic risks.
Those who can be caught by law because they have butter behind their ears (meaning they know but try to hide that they are guilty in something), the system gladly elevates them into its ranks. They form an excellent executive wing of power, while being reminded on a daily basis that handcuffs can be snapped on their hands at any time if they do not behave as the emperor expects.
On the other hand, a free-living and thinking person poses great danger to the system, as he can speak the truth, even in front of the emperor, which cannot be uttered from the mouths of system servants dragged by their balls. An innocent person who cannot be caught by the law is as much, if not more, dangerous to the legitimacy of the system than rioting and seething murderers.
This is the ultimate goal of unleashing the online dictatorship: to eradicate the truth, so that in the end only lies or uncharacteristic informational garbage is allowed to remain. All this with reference to the majority, democracy, public interest, and inclusion. The stake of the Third World War is: gaining ultimate control over the human body and mind. A commitment to which all existing human systems have so far failed.
