I’m not one who’s prone to thinking that things ever really get much worse very quickly. I tend to be skeptical when people say that we’ve turned a corner.
But in the recent past, we’ve had the TikTok ban (clearly became an urgent issue after it became a major vehicle for challenging media narrative about Israel among young people), Twitter and Facebook clearly taking orders from the US government and banning accounts for supporting Palestine, the arrests of the Sarah Wilkinson, the Telegram guy, and the other OSINT guy arrested at Heathrow (can’t remember his name).
But for me, it’s events just in the last week that have really caught my notice. The Electronic Intidada - relatively small but awesome website and channel on YouTube - got hit with a weeklong ban for reasons unknown. The Red Stream - a small website and Telegram channel - got called out by Lucifer himself (Antony Blinken) and they got bumped from YouTube. And just the other day, Light Herself was talking about how we should arrest and charge people when they spread “Russian disinformation” (you just know libs want to arrest people for saying inflation is too high as being “Russian disinformation”).
I don’t, it feels like things have rapidly accelerated just in the last couple months. Anyone else feeling this? Or do we still have a long way to go here before we can say things have actually gotten “bad”?
I don’t think it’s increasing overall, it’s just been changing to be more internet-focused. You have to remember that since the internet first came into the popular global stage, governments worldwide have been scrambling to get a chokehold on it.
Massively overemphasising the dangers of online sexual abusers, drug trade, “terrorist propaganda”, cyberhackers, copyright etc has been the approach of most governments since the 90s, and it’s absolutely worked. Despite being borderline non-existent threats, it’s been the excuse governments needed to have the authority to block whatever they want and have more of a hand in any large-scale online entities. (Not to mention playing up fears of “foreign censorship” as super evil so our own looks good by comparison).
Obviously, in the 90s, it wasn’t a yet major issue, because most people still watched TV news. As people have slowly gone online and turned away from traditional media, governments have simply continued to ramp up the fear of internet boogeymen to ensure they have a similar hold on internet media sources instead.
So I’d argue there’s always been this strong grip on censorship, it’s just as internet-goers, we’re slowly seeing it migrate here from elsewhere.