If Online Activism Doesn’t Have Impact, Why Is The Establishment Censoring The Internet?

Don’t believe the popular naysaying that online political postings don’t have an impact. They have a big impact, and the establishment has made this clear with its massive efforts to astroturf and police the internet. Why did the Clinton campaign have David Brock set up a vast array of bots and paid shills to intimidate those who opposed it? And why is this troll operation by Clinton’s circle still going on? Because the power centers know social media is a crucial part of the battle for control over the culturally accepted narrative.

As Caitlin Johnstone observed a year ago, when alternative media was defying the state’s propaganda systems like never before, the establishment is incapable of winning the information war. “When your candidates have their words being audited by entire teams of campaign strategists before making a single tweet, there’s no competing with thousands of minds all around the world pouring inspired creativity into a memetic war against the rigid, blocky ideas you’re trying to circulate,” she wrote. That’s why the ruling elites have since used vast online censorship to try to shut those noncompliant voices down.

After April, in direct correlation with online companies’ recent “anti-fake news” censorship measures, viewership of the World Socialist Website and other alternative outlets started to drop. As Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google have continued to impose censorship in coordination with their partners in the U.S. intelligence agencies, socialist, antiwar, and generally anti-establishment sites have had their viewership further cut down. My own experience online has eerily followed this pattern, with Facebook restricting my ability to post my material ever more severely in the last year.

After the end of net neutrality, which will come on April 23, the new ability of telecom companies to suppress disfavored websites will make our job much harder. The new McCarthyism has already made dissent dangerous to voice, with many Americans now being conditioned through mass media to see any ideological deviant as a Russian agent. This Red Scare will only get worse, and better supported by law enforcement, as the deep state’s Russia hysteria campaign continues. 

This all means we need to fight the war of ideas even harder. Not just because we need to make up for our losses in the war, but because we’re too close to winning the war for the establishment’s comfort. My personal regimen for increasing this discomfort consists of three actions: proactively consuming dissenting media by reading a series of the censored sites every day, among them World Socialist Website, Consortiumnews, and Truthdig; contributing to the disruption by frequently making political posts and articles; and coordinating with others in alternative media.

The latter action was advocated by World Socialist Website’s David North during his site’s January livestream about organizing against online censorship. “A coalition needs to be formed” between anti-war and socialist websites, said North, “to rigorously defend internet freedom, net neutrality, to organize the defense of both websites and individuals who come under attack.”

Ultimately this united front needs to include not just those on the left, but the libertarian, right-leaning, and otherwise ideologically differing people who share the cause of fighting this global corporate and governmental attack on our freedoms. “We don’t even have the luxury of refusing to collaborate with the libertarians and Trumpsters against the deep state, much less the anti-establishment lefties who aren’t on our exact wavelength on every single issue,” Caitlin Johnstone has also written. “If they’re doing something that helps extinguish the fire in any part of the burning house, we should be bigging that up and helping them, not tearing them down.” 

The single greatest threat to peace, justice, and liberty is the U.S./NATO power establishment that’s driving this effort to censor the internet. The Americans who are aware of this threat must unite to defeat it.