I’ve been thinking of potential measures that corporate-controlled authoritarian governments could use against any kind of left-wing information or organizing, and it seems like an obvious one is a sudden, widespread crackdown on left-wing content. In practice, social media companies would collude with the government to:
- Wipe out all left-wing social media profiles and ban left-wing rhetoric under the justification that it is “terrorism-related content”.
- Block access to thousands of left-wing sites at once and de-list them from search engines
- Update content moderation algorithms to prevent more of this content from being published or recommended
- Do all of these on the same day to cause the most disorientation and fear
- Continually go after the hosts of the niche left-wing news and communication channels that still remain, such as small websites, fediverse instances, and encrypted communication channels. Throw their operators in prison and make examples out of them
In effect, due to the centralized nature of social media and news, the online left could instantly be scattered through the collusion of just a few large corporations.
It would:
- Galvanize the populist right-wing base
- Stoke feelings of fear, isolation, and hopelessness among the opposition, deterring action
- Weaken the left’s ability to organize
- Make it harder for people to learn about real left-wing ideas and stances
Why wouldn’t they take that opportunity?
The bulk of online left-wing activity could instantly be wiped out in a single day. Why am I not hearing more people talking about that? Why do so many left-leaning people think sites like BlueSky will save them? Do they really think they are resisting by using centralized social media platforms? The corporatocracy has complete control over all of the infrastructure…
In my opinion, every influencer on the left should be screaming from the rooftops every single day that the most productive thing you can be doing is talking to people, building connections, and organizing in the real world, because our platform on the Internet could vanish instantaneously.
Anyway, I hope I’m wrong, but it feels like something that could easily happen. What are your thoughts?
Sure they could do that with centralized social media as long as the respective owners are on board, but with the wider internet as a whole it’s not that easy. I’m sure someone that’s more knowledgeable can expand on this, but you’re talking about first identifying all of the sites/domains that need to be blocked (assuming more don’t pop up while you’re tabulating), and then getting every ISP and search provider in the country to simultaneously kill those hostnames in their DNS registers. You’d still have to coerce overseas operators to do the same, or block traffic out of the country (good luck because a, business require international communication, and b, many US based providers serve those outside the US).
Sure they could (and probably will) do some shenanigans to severely cripple our means of fighting back, but like piracy, this is the internet; we always find a way around their bullshit.
Searching for information is the primary bottleneck. Search engines are not deterministic any more. That means individual targeting is already being done.
It is a good time to learn about Libreboot, Tails, Tor, and the dark web. A white list firewall is a pain, but not impossible. The pcWRT stuff might be an option for an easier OpenWRT setup if you find it challenging.
All of this is what Stallman was trying to stop in the first place. Everyone needs to do this stuff too, especially if you have nothing to hide and nothing to lose. By being part of the noise, you are enabling/anonymizing those that are willing and able to take action.