THE other day I chatted with an old friend whose favourite YouTube channels were being purged mostly because of who was subscribed to them (not what the channels actually said). We live in a climate of growing censorship; those who are in denial about it aren't keeping up with the news or selectively absorbing what's in the news sites (or maybe the reporters con the audience into thinking it's just about far-right violence).

"I had a dispute with Canonical over a decade ago after someone who was rather rude had linked to Techrights and they tried to link that person to us (or to me personally)."Hours ago I saw the example above in Reddit (then decided to respond with a spontaneous video). This is the kind of crap we've written responses to about half a dozen times last year. When we republish police records or Bill Gates deposition videos we aren't spreading "conspiracy theories" but putting actual evidence -- hard evidence -- in the public domain. It's inevitable that due to the nature of social control media and appeal of clickbait some people will opportunistically spin what we actually wrote. It sometimes helps incite (by misportrayal, misrepresentation, misquoting etc.) against particular sites, which ought not be judged by who links to them. I had a dispute with Canonical over a decade ago after someone who was rather rude had linked to Techrights and they tried to link that person to us (or to me personally).

The issue at hand isn't unique to us. When this was brought up in FLOSS Weekly (I was on that show 12 years ago) the host Leo Laporte responded to Jono Bacon by stating that it's not fair to judge a site by various people who read it and might occasionally link to it. Sites aren't in control of how they're presented (the context) and nor should they be. But to hold sites accountable for things they're not in control of is unfair and it seems like social control networks (Twitter for sure) discriminate against particular sites based on a gross generalisation, hinged upon unhinged people who have nothing whatsoever to do with those sites.

It's worth restating: we live in an atmosphere of incredible (and still growing) societal backlash/breakdown, fueled in part by unemployment and capitalist overstretch, accentuated by forced lock-downs caused by a pandemic. The response from the public is something like "tax the rich" or "eat the rich" or "billionaires ought not exist!"

The response from social control networks which they control (Twitter, for instance, controlled mostly by oligarchs) is to muzzle the masses, based on blanket censorship and no due process (let alone a right of appeal) [1, 2, 3].

Failing efforts to muzzle the masses, some throw the journalists inside the oven. ⬆