https://greenwald.substack....etale-and-censorship

We ban free speech, electronically burn books and are told we need to war against China to give them free speech and freedom.

"A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Type your email…
Subscribe
Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on earth where humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people are free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone — influential or obscure — who is saying something they believe should be forbidden, and then use the corporate megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed in order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate managers or challenges their information hegemony...."

There's more at the link.

I read that fairly carefully from end to end.

I can't say that it changes my mind about anything, because there's a lot of complexity to this wide-ranging tableau of both already familiar and also far more novel Internet-enabled social media platforms, X-rayed in juxtaposition to powerful mainstream media corporations and brand names which Glenn Greenwald examines using the binocularity of his investigative microscope.

OK, I was having some fun with that sentence.

I mean it was kind of an absorbing "read", but I don't have any obvious conclusion(s) from it, other than "Caveat Emptor" when it comes to anything that I would read or view in the way of journalism and reportage.

I thought enough of Glenn Greenwald's writing in that column that I looked up some of his other recent articles and scrolled through one with particular interest:

"The Lincoln Project, Facing Multiple Scandals, is Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality"

quote Liberals heralded this group of life-long scammers, sleaze merchants and con artists as noble men of conscience, enabling them to fleece and deceive the public.

Glenn Greenwald for Glenn Greenwald; February 12, 2021.
https://greenwald.substack....ject-facing-multiple

quote Originally posted by rinselberg: I can't say that it changes my mind about anything, because there's a lot of complexity to this wide-ranging tableau of both already familiar and also far more novel Internet-enabled social media platforms, X-rayed in juxtaposition to powerful mainstream media corporations and brand names which Glenn Greenwald examines using the binocularity of his investigative microscope.