It is my opinion that government and the corporate world have had a twenty year mission to censor free speech in the U.S.A. that has matured. Sure one might tweet for zero pay a brief message sufficient to give away the gist of data for data miners. Complex political, historical and philosophical ideas require more than would satisfy a twit in a tweet. One might post in a room at Facebook closed to all besides members that is subject to deletion by F.B. managers or a group manager, yet individuals haven’t got public chat rooms where they can easily post writing that won’t disappear like morning dew at the will of political censors, much less earn anything for it.
Governments of the three biggest nuclear weaponized nations have in effect, the same attitude toward free speech concerning mass communications; they are against any that isn’t sycophantic in support of government policy. The United States has a corporatist form of government and a broadcast media owned by the rich or financed by the government and the rich (i.e. National Public Radio) so it represses perspectives that rival or are alternative to existing, established corporate power structure and policy inertia. China and Russia simply stamp out or filter out dissenting public communication.
My personal experience with the growth of internet censorship began with the Bush administration. N.P.R. has been a generally leftist organization since its founding. After Bush II was elected and the nation became temporarily more conservative after the 9-11 attack for some reason N.P.R. decided to close down its free speech chat room that was nominally on topics discussed on air during the day. National Public Radio eliminated the chat room named ‘Your Turn’ that was completely wild and very contentious. In the first part of the millennium Internet chat rooms were populated by partisans and trolls without any sort of censoring. The disappearance of ‘Your Turn’ heralded the increase of censorship of the Internet.
In the late 1990s with the rise of internet chat rooms and web sites there wasn’t much censorship of the new media. Blogging developed to rival to regular broadcast media. The corporate world would require a new way to subjugate social media to serve its corporate will. The basic means for that was money; the rich could buy up and close down or restrict every free speech outlet that appeared, eventually. Concentrated wealth and power of nearly every form is intolerant of free speech. China, Russia and China each have insider political elements that will eliminate free speech that is antipathetic to their political power. Human nature and the will to power through control of free political expression exists existentially. Without adequate countermeasures by the public sector, the public sector will effectively lose the right of free speech in substantive political areas.
I discovered that numerous public writing spaces were exceedingly partisan to the point of eliminating accounts that contained politically incorrect speech. If one wasn’t a Democrat many web sites simply deleted one’s account. Democrats in the Internet were early on filters of politically antipathetic speech. By the time of the Obama administrations those Boston based Internet companies were virtually all partisan filters in support of homosexual marriage and other Democratic partisan causes. My accounts continued to be deleted as I moved from one sinking surface to another trying to relocate my work. In December 24, 3029 my Helium account was deleted so I moved my material to Blogger- a Google company that had been purchased from geocities. I had an idea that Helium was about to blow up my account and copied my material out of there.
With about every place on the Internet to write for pay eliminated for those that at least, weren’t Democrats, I put a lot of effort in to increasing my views at Blogger, where I was approaching my first $100 of earnings with about 450,000 views. Then I criticized N.S.A. surveillance of U.S. phone calls- The Patriot Act, got a comment on the post that my writing wasn’t helpful, and then experienced the first stage crash in views from as many as 1000 per day down t0 100. During the Obama administration views of my Blogger posts dropped from 1000 to 100. During the Biden administration the views dropped to zero per month. The only posts of my at Blogger that are viewed are those more than a month old.
I realized that Google’s Blogger was a somewhat safe place to write. They are a large enough business to resist being bought out and having free speech writing platforms eliminated. Instead the slow degradation of views increased, and the most recent is the one of not permitting any views of posts for thirty days. The policy is unofficial yet effective eliminates free speech without overt censorship.
At the time I relocated my writing to Blogger I realized that Blogger too would eventually close down or find some way to censor. The trend is irresistible in the U.S.A. YouTube also demonetizes content it doesn’t like politically- another Google business bought up by a big fish in the pond. So I began duplicating my writing at word press. Lucky I did since Blogger is effectively completely censored now.
I don’t expect WordPress to allow free speech forever. The rich can simply buy up and apply leverage to censor, minimize or shut down web sites that support antipathetic political speech. The practice affects democracy and the idea of sovereign citizen political self-determination through a marketplace of ideas and voting. The public uses social media for political speech and because social media is privately owned the censorship is lawful. Plainly the public needs a publicly owned social media alternative that doesn’t delete, censor, obscure or repress free speech in an individual citizen’s personal web space. Democrats won’t get that done. Neither will they reduce the costs or difficulties in getting a patent for inventions, find a way to make sure that 100% of American citizens have health care even if too poor to afford Medicare plan B, secure the nation’s borders, develop high speed (300+) electric trans-continental cargo and passenger tube trains or other policies unliked by Corporate America.
A society that is coerced into being sycophantic minions of Wall Street isn’t democracy; it is an advanced version of the governments of China and Russia.
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