New revelations show that the pandemic has allowed for governments and Big Tech to expand the surveillance-industrial complex that tightens the state’s grip on thought and movement.
A recent batch of Twitter internal documents released by Elon Musk via journalist David Zweigon the platform itself reveals that one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative.
“Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing,” Zweig wrote.
He added that “...this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the non-scientists at Twitter as Covid “misinformation.”
We’ve also learned from previous Musk-approved Twitter file releases of the cozy relationship between government officials – including those working for the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI – and big US social media outlets like Twitter, which routinely cooperated on various government priorities and agendas ranging from framing foreign wars to promoting certain narratives about geopolitical competitors (like Russia) under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” All of this in an ostensibly democratic country that’s supposed to value free speech and debate.
Just like they do with war propaganda, the US government and its Western allies went out of their way to manufacture consent, and they used the very same Big Tech platforms that were once the great hope of those seeking to break free from more controlled corporate media. And the gatekeepers of those platforms, like those at Twitter, were far too keen to abide. Under the guise of combating disinformation, citizens ended up applauding censorship and descending in lynch mobs on those designated as the current threat to virtuous Western societal norms – be they “Russians” or “anti-vaxxers.”
And that’s not all that the pandemic has in common with other crises shamelessly exploited by governments. A new report by the Associated Press has found that the pandemic permitted the expansion of global surveillance, with police in multiple countries using “technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies.”
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