The Plot to Silence (or Deplatform) Techrights
I generally don't do books as they seem like a dying medium that the younger generation is barely even familiar with (my generation already de-prioritised them). The eminent professor wrote Computer Science books since the 1970s, inspiring Linux. But Linus Torvalds, if he was born after 2000, would not have picked up a book.
This past month I've been spending time working on the text of an online publication that I expect to come in the form of PDF (open access) and blog posts. People need to know what happened and to understand the methods of online censorship, piggybacking some partisan political tactics that sometimes manifest or rear their ugly head in "CoC" form. We covered this before and I spoke to people who worked for companies whose service was basically leveraging women and minority causes to censor critics of corporations. Those were whistleblowers, not people defending the practice, and I still intend to cover this one day. I did a long video about it last summer.
Censorship tactics are fast evolving. They're nowadays disguised as "protection", with terms like "safe space" being thrown around by agents of monopolies (whose business involves actually killing people).
The monopolies have gained tremendous political power, not just "market power". There must be something to counteract all this. On the Web, or what's left of it (mostly "webapps" and gatekeepers such as Clownflare), there are ways to resist censorship or to make it a lot harder. On the Net, which is bigger than the Web, there are alternatives (to the Web) and we need to collectively help them grow.
Either way, the present Web can be an ugly, mean, nasty place. The solution isn't to cull voices but rather to sort material based on its merit. Social control media goes against that, so we need to contribute to the ultimate demise of all social control media - in all of its forms. We need to teach people to set up their IRC networks (there are about 500 of them if one counts those of considerable size) and E2EE is possible over IRC networks, albeit with some plug-ins as IRC clients typically lack handling of private keys, except for client-server exchanges. 2 years ago we covered Mumble for self-hosted voice chat, which includes group calls. Mumble and Murmur are Free software and can properly encrypt discussions.
Privacy and security are closely related to free speech (or contrariwise censorship) because it is hard to censor those whose speech you either cannot see or cannot understand.
As Andy explained a week ago, many self-described security experts are phonies, charlatans, and liars. Don't believe them and don't buy their snake-oil. They not only attack free speech but also free press, motivated by envy and delusions of grandeur (seeking easy affirmation from the corporations they protect). █