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Caitlin Johnstone writes in a blog post over at Medium that corporate censorship is ramping up while people are distracted by the menace of government censorship.
It is true that it is the most controversial and repulsive speech which is most severely in need of protection, and that a government which is granted the power to silence Nazis can be expected to use that power to silence political dissent. But there is no danger of this ever happening in the United States, because corporate censorship can be used to silence anti-establishment voices with far less pushback.
Egged on by the resurfacing of obnoxious and sometimes illegal groups, more groups are pushing for, and sometimes getting, full online silence from other voices. Those in power will have corporations do any of the dirty work that might generate push back.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:30PM (2 children)
Sorry, I don't buy that a smaller, weaker, corrupt US government working with powerful corrupt businesses is going to be worse than a larger, stronger, corrupt US government doing the same thing. I think the problem here is that the author of the piece is working from bad priors. They need the government to do their shaping of society (for example, Caitlin Johnstone supports single payer [counterpropa.com] health care and fighting global warming [inquisitr.com]) so a priori, they can't advocate anything that would diminish that power to achieve their goals. OTOH, I don't need society so shaped, thus I don't have a similar need to protect the power of government.
I also think there is a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance here, exhibited by the author who routinely expounds on government conspiracy theories (such as the Seth Rich assassination theory [thedailybanter.com]), and then rails against the corporate media or other anti-business diatribes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @10:45AM (1 child)
If you look in Africa you can see many examples of smaller, weaker, corrupt (and sometimes US-installed) governments working with powerful large corporations to screw the locals. When your small government's military is smaller and weaker than a corporation's "Private Security Team" guess who is calling the shots?
In contrast if you have lots of normal folk/voters working in the Big Government it means more people are actually represented in Government by virtue of actually being _part_ of it. Yeah they may still do the wrong stuff but that's just like voters voting for the wrong person.
In short, if the rulers are somehow crazy enough to pay to keep around a Big Government it means lots more people are getting paid (while there's money to pay them anyway). I think you can see this in some oil-states (almost like basic income ;) ). In contrast in many other places the rulers don't bother, the rest of the country could starve whether there's enough money or not - the oil money goes mainly the Corporation and the rest goes to the Warlord. I'd say the latter is worse.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 18 2017, @12:48PM
Which government has that problem? Sorry, even unrecognized African rebel groups can field a larger military.
We call that "conflict of interest" where now, a large population of voters has incentive to vote against the common interests of the country in order to increase their piece of the pie. It's great if you're a cog in the government wheel, and terrible, if you're a taxpayer paying for people to do nothing.
That's a fantasy. We have as counterexamples, Russia, China, the US, and EU, for example, their large and growing security and intelligence bureaucracies.