Tag Archives: Facebook

Government Censors are Losing Their Minds

If you saw Mark Zuckerberg on The Joe Rogan Experience last week you would know that he blew the whistle on the Biden administration’s extreme propaganda/censorship enforcement measures taken against Facebook.  (Joe Rogan Experience). Zuckerberg gave a very detailed account on how the administration and its agencies cajoled, bullied and threatened Facebook into becoming essentially a house organ of the Deep State and its current party of choice, the Democratic National Committee. Tens of millions of listeners (far more than the audiences of all cable network stations combined) were so educated.  Many sighs of relief were issued when Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook was terminating the services of “fact checking” organizations through whom the Biden regime carried out its propaganda and censorship activity. 

Some were not so sanguine.  The news was received like an earthquake at the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida (see, Meet the Censors).  Its International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) head, Angie Holon, called an “emergency meeting” of the network to discuss the implications of Zuckerberg’s bombshell. Holon told Business Insider that Zuckerberg had created a somber and frustrated mood among IFCN fact checkers.  No surprise since IFCN had previously reported that Facebook was its “predominant revenue stream.”  Holon told BI, “This is bad news for the financial sustainability of fact-checking journalism. (read censorship)”

The news and IFCN’s reaction demonstrates that but for government strong arming, there is no market for censorship services. The corporate media, with the immediate sharp precision of a Nazi soldier jackknife spin move, turned on Zuckerberg like a pack of jackals.  Take Mikey Bloomberg’s state propaganda rag. Less than a month ago Bloomberg devoted huge amounts of space to promote the alleged brilliance, power and humanity of Zuckerberg.  See e.g. the video homage that was centerpiece of the promotion:  Bloomberg on Zuckerberg.  Yet, three weeks later on the day after Zuckerberg’s Rogan interview, Bloomberg proclaimed the following:

One of the things that makes Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg something of a comic figure in the tech world is that there’s no one in Silicon Valley—and maybe no other domain, save Hollywood—who’s as invested in conveying authenticity while also being so nakedly inauthentic.

With the snap of a censorship-dependent oligarch’s fingers, one promoted as a God-like figure is condemned as a disciple of Satan. Upon Elon Musk purchasing of Twitter and turning it into the last bastion of free speech, Bloomberg set up a podcast “Elon Inc” and commenced to smear him literally on a daily basis. So, the second one reveals oneself as supportive of the United States Bill of Rights one becomes targeted for vicious treatment as a non-person by state-controlled corporate media. Remember this lesson, for your own well-being and integrity. It also sets up the moral of the coming multi-part series: Scientology and the Deep State.

Cybercult Formation

 

How do warlike tribes resembling cults form up in cyberspace?  Pankaj Mishra offers historical, psychological, and sociological answers in Age of Anger (2017).  A short passage from that book provides food for thought and self-reflection:

The current vogue for the zombie apocalypse in films seems to have been anticipated by the multitudes on city pavements around the world, lurching forward while staring blankly at screens. Constantly evolving mobile media technologies such as smartphones, tablets and wearable devices have made every moment pregnant with the possibility of a sign from somewhere. The possibility, renewed each morning, of ‘likes’ and augmented followers on social media have boosted ordinary image consciousness among millions into obsessive self-projection. The obligation to present the most appealing side of oneself is irresistible and infectious. Digital platforms are programmed to map these compulsive attempts at self-presentation (or, self-prettification), and advertisers stand ready to sell things that help people keep counterfeiting their portraits.

Meanwhile, in the new swarm of online communities – bound by Facebook shares and retweets, fast-moving timelines and twitter storms – the spaces between individuals are shrinking. In his prescient critique of the neo-liberal notion of individual freedom, Rousseau had argued that human beings live neither for themselves nor for their country in a commercial society where social value is modelled on monetary value; they live for the satisfaction of their vanity, or amour propre: the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself.

But, as Kierkegaard pointed out, the seeker of individual freedom must ‘break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him’, and then out of the ‘vast penitentiary built by the reflection of his associates’. He absolutely won’t find freedom in the confining fun-house mirrors of Facebook and Twitter. For the vast prison of seductive images does not heal the perennially itchy and compulsively scratched wounds of amour propre. On the contrary: even the most festive spirit of communality disguises the competitiveness and envy provoked by constant exposure to other people’s success and well-being.

As Rousseau warned, amour proper is doomed to be perpetually unsatisfied. Too commonplace and parasitic on fickle opinion, it nourishes in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and amour propre can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby an individual feels acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection – in Gore Vidal’s pithy formulation, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.’