Catholic Arena
Over the past couple of months, my time-line on Twitter has crashed repeatedly causing the enigmatic — Try Again — message to appear.
At times I ponder whether this has a deeper philosophical meaning for my life, but I usually put it down to a Wi-Fi glitch or whatever! That said, this glitch has been curiously coincidental with the recent censorship happening throughout Anti-Social Media. That leaves me with a niggling suspicion that my feed is being manipulated by the ‘Algo’ — the master Twitter algorithm. And, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you!” (Catch-22.)
Laura Loomer is a good example of Cancel Culture in action. The clip below shows Loomer interrupting a US Senate hearing to harangue Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter.
Loomer is a rather extreme activist but after the Senate issue, she found herself banned from Twitter; Facebook; Instagram; PayPal; Venmo; GoFundMe; Cash App; Periscope; Medium; Uber; Uber-Eats; Lyft; Teespring; and Chase Bank Online Banking. You may not agree with anything Loomer says, but this sort of crushing response should worry ordinary folk.
Regular people have been cancelled over just one errant post or ‘inappropriate’ ❤️Like ❤️. Recently, Jon Holbrook, a Barrister in the UK, was expelled from his chambers because the Mob was offended by a short Tweet in which he opining about a teenager opposing her school’s dress/hair code. Again, you might not agree with Holbrook’s take on hair, but his subsequent comments about Cancel Culture are on the mark:
“A democracy cannot function when the protagonists can speak freely whilst the antagonists are muzzled. The woke may think they are lovely people who just want us all to be nice to one another. But they are not lovely people, as my targeting shows: they are intolerant proselytisers who want to silence those who challenge them. They seek to deploy, not the jackboot of totalitarianism, but the cancel culture of intolerance. In the name of democracy, they must not succeed.”
Censorship in these platforms must have been occurring for a very long time when so many felt comfortable in removing the account of a sitting President of the United States, all at the same time. The rest of us Plebs must take that as a real warning.
In the video below, Jack Dorsey advised his staff that the action which removed Trump’s account will go “much bigger” and “much longer!” Yowzer!
Trump has also discovered that at least two investment banks will terminate their long-standing business relationships with him. Not only is he socially ‘de-platformed’ but the former President of the US is being financially de-platformed too.
TDS has become so extreme that there are calls to digitally erase Trump’s cameo appearance in Home Alone II! This has uncanny similarities to Stalin’s erasure of people who had fallen out of favour, a.k.a. sent to a Gulag or killed. (TDS = Trump Derangement Syndrome.)
Internet Censorship
Twitterers saw clear evidence of account cancellation with Trump. Most Pro-Life sites are still active but many noticed a marked reduction of followers and believe ‘The Purge’ is happening.
Twitter put warning labels on Tweets if they perceived a need for “Fact-Checking” or are “misinformation.” Curiously most every label went on conservative and Right-Wing posts! These warnings were visible but they are designed to bias the reader and might allow the Algo’ to ‘Shadow Ban’ those posts.
“Shadow Banning” “…is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community so that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.”
Censorship on the Internet can be done by governments, ‘backbone’ equipment operators, Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) Certificate Authorities and application service providers (e.g., Twitter) amongst others. (Wikipedia has a detailed article on how it can be done.)
Uganda v. USA
The unilateral censorship of the sitting President of the United States of America was put into comedic relief when the Twitter Global Public Policy Team had the gall to lecture the Ugandan government about Internet Censorship during their recent election! Tucker Carlson’s delightful commentary is below.
Pro-Life Censorship
One can definitely understand there should be limits on the posting of very graphic images, but frequently those standards are applied unilaterally.
In a 2014 article in The Public Discourse, Richard M. Doerflinger discusses the results of a study published by the Guttmacher Institute (a “pro-abortion-rights think tank” previously affiliated with Planned Parenthood.) He concluded;
“Maybe this is all pretty simple after all: if you want fewer abortions, oppose abortion; if you want lots of abortions, promote abortion. And maybe more Americans are learning what abortion is: a violent act against life, a grief for women, a corruption of medicine, and an embarrassment to a civilized society. Education to further advance that understanding should be accompanied by positive steps to help women at risk of abortion, and to help health-care professionals and policymakers address these women’s real needs.
In short, pro-life Americans should rejoice at the good news, and redouble their efforts to help pregnant women and their unborn children. Notwithstanding the spin doctors of the abortion industry, we are seeing some light at the end of that long dark tunnel.”
That might partly support the use of the very graphic image of the human remains after a 15-week abortion below, but I understand that at some point this image was censored by Twitter.
(It can be found in the tweets from Created Equal.)
Other graphic images are allowed to stay. For example, there are many graphic images on Twitter from War Zones. The Tweet below has an image from the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.
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