{"id":138703,"date":"2019-07-29T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=138703"},"modified":"2019-08-12T10:20:51","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T09:20:51","slug":"twitter-restores-assange-activism-account-in-response-to-backlash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/07\/twitter-restores-assange-activism-account-in-response-to-backlash\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Restores Assange Activism Account in Response to Backlash"},"content":{"rendered":"

22 Jul 2019 – <\/em>After a week of vocal protests from online supporters of Julian Assange, Twitter has reversed<\/a> its unjust removal of the prominent pro-Assange activism account @Unity4J.<\/p>\n

After the account was suspended without any explanation<\/a> being presented to its operators, Assange supporters drew a clear line in the sand against Internet censorship and began making a big noise that couldn\u2019t be ignored. The account\u2019s suspension drew condemnations from high-profile Assange supporters like\u00a0Pink Floyd\u2019s Roger Waters<\/a>, World Socialist Website<\/a>, RT<\/a> and\u00a0Lee Camp<\/a>, as well as a sustained social media campaign by grassroots supporters which included artwork, memes, and of course relentless \u201ctagging\u201d of Twitter Support and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Political dissidents in general, and Assange supporters in particular, can take this as a very positive sign. It cannot be denied that there is pressure being applied to new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to forcibly marginalize all perspectives which fall outside the ever-shrinking Overton window of approved political discourse, but it also cannot be denied that speaking out works. If enough people push back against Internet censorship to make it too conspicuous and obvious, it can\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

Unity4J co-founder Elizabeth Lea Vos called this from the early hours of the account\u2019s suspension, tweeting<\/a>, \u201cWe know that Twitter can and does reinstate accounts after suspension in the wake of a public outcry: @caitoz was suspended only to be reinstated after multiple journalists spoke out against it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c@caitoz\u201d is my account, which was indeed reinstated after I was suspended from Twitter<\/a> for expressing political wrongthink last year. A bunch of high-profile journalists and activists helped voice objection to my unjust removal from the platform, not necessarily because they liked my work but because they understood that the direction the platform was headed posed a grave threat to all politically dissident speech.<\/p>\n

So we see a pattern here where censorship can only happen in the unseen margins.\u00a0In a society where our rulers must maintain their nice guy image of free speech and democracy, censorship only works when it\u2019s invisible. The social engineers cannot operate in an overtly totalitarian way without shattering the free democracy image and thus losing the ability to effectively propagandize the masses, without which they cannot rule. We can use this weakness of theirs to our advantage by continually ringing alarm bells and shining a spotlight on any overtly totalitarian behavior yelling, \u201cWhat\u2019s this? Why are you doing that? Hey everyone, come look at this weird thing they\u2019re doing!\u201d Internet censorship in its current form can\u2019t operate under such conditions.<\/p>\n

Though Twitter\u2019s opaque and unaccountable moderation process makes it impossible to ever know exactly what happened behind the scenes, from my own experience it\u2019s probably safe to assume that @Unity4J was conducting itself in the same way thousands of other Twitter accounts behave every single day without issue, but it got singled out (possibly via establishment-friendly mass reporting) due to its dissident political speech. Some admin ruled that if you squint at the account\u2019s behavior and the Twitter rules in just the right way, removing the account was warranted. Then a bunch of loud complaints began coming in, prompting an investigation which found that by golly, it turns out that we don\u2019t have to squint at the facts of the matter in that weird way after all. After which the account was restored.<\/p>\n

Whenever there\u2019s a spate of iron-fisted censorship from a large online platform, I see many dissidents talking about vacating that platform in favor of fringe sites with a more tolerant attitude toward dissident speech. Please do not do this. If you want to spend time on a much smaller platform like Mastodon or Minds, then by all means go ahead and do so, but please remain active on large, mainstream sites as well.<\/p>\n

Remember, the goal of all political dissent is to get dissident ideas into mainstream consciousness<\/a>. If we all vacate the areas where the mainstream public are spending their time, we\u2019re doing the social engineers\u2019 job for them by quarantining ourselves to some isolated fringe sector of the Internet. That\u2019s exactly what they want us to do. They want us to remove ourselves so we can\u2019t infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink.<\/p>\n

So don\u2019t do it for them. If they\u2019re going to keep clamping down on dissident speech online, force them to do it out in the open where everyone can see. As we\u2019ve just witnessed, they have a much, much harder time conducting censorship while under the light of public scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Our job here is very simple: if we can get the mainstream public to start paying attention to the actual mechanisms of empire, oligarchy and oppression, we win. If we can\u2019t, we lose. Everything that doesn\u2019t help us toward this end is a frivolous distraction. The social engineers understand all of this quite clearly. We need to understand it too.<\/p>\n

Stand in the center of the public stage, and keep infecting the herd.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Caitlin Johnstone is a Melbourne-based journalist who specialises in American politics, finance and foreign affairs. Her articles have been published in <\/em>Inquisitr<\/a>, Zero Hedge<\/a>, New York Observer<\/a>, MintPress News<\/a>, The Real News<\/a>, International Policy Digest<\/a> and more. Caitlin is the author of <\/em>Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers, an illustrated poetical guide to reclaiming the earth from the forces of death and destruction. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 intrepidreport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Jul 2019 – After a week of vocal protests from online supporters of Julian Assange, Twitter has reversed its unjust removal of the prominent pro-Assange activism account @Unity4J. It cannot be denied that there is pressure being applied to new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to forcibly marginalize all perspectives which fall outside the ever-shrinking Overton window of approved political discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,45,139,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-activism","category-justice","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}