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Twitter Shut Down Caitlin Johnstone's Account For “Abusing” John McCain
17
August, 2018
UPDATE: It
looks like the suspension was
lifted just
after I hit publish on this. A lot of my fans and even a few haters
made a big noise in objection to Twitter’s actions, and it worked!
As we discussed
recently,
the plutocratic manipulators work so hard to manufacture our consent
because they need that consent, and they can’t act if we don’t
give it to them. I’ve left the article as-is below for posterity,
and so people can see my experience with #Resistance Twitter’s
attempt to silence dissident speech. Never stop fighting.
Hello Caitlin Johnstone,
Your account, caitoz has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.
Specifically, for:
Violating our rules against abusive behavior.
You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.
Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts. If you wish to appeal this suspension, please contact our support team.
They’re
calling it a “suspension”, but nobody can view my page and I
can’t perform any activities on it, and it appears to be permanent
unless I succeed in going through the anonymous and unaccountable
appeals process. Now when people try to access my account, they get a
screen that looks something like this depending on what device
they’re using:
I
haven’t abused anybody, and I’ve been observing extreme caution
with my language for the last few days ever since I made a political
tweet about John McCain which drew the wrath of #Resistance Twitter.
The offending tweet reads as follows:
“Friendly public service reminder that John McCain has devoted his entire political career to slaughtering as many human beings as possible at every opportunity, and the world will be improved when he finally dies.”
I
posted this four days ago when John McCain was trending because
Donald Trump didn’t
pay him any respect when
signing the bloated NDAA military spending bill that was
(appropriately) named after him. My reason for doing so was simple:
the establishment pundits responsible for manipulating the way
Americans think and vote have been aggressively promulgating the
narrative that McCain is a hero and a saint, and I think it’s very
important to disrupt that narrative. If we allow them to canonize
this warmongering psychopath, then they’ll have normalized and
sanctified his extensive
recordof
pushing for psychopathic acts of military violence throughout
his entire political career.
They’ll have helped manufacture support for war and the
military-industrial complex war whores who facilitate it. Saying
we’ll be glad when he’s gone is a loud and unequivocal way of
rejecting that establishment-imposed narrative.
Interestingly,
I’ve been saying this exact same thing repeatedly for
over a year. An article I wrote about McCain in July of last year
titled “Please
Just Fucking Die Already”
received a far more widespread backlash than this one, with articles
published about it by outlets like CNN, USA
Today and
the Washington
Post.
Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talked
about me on The
View.
I was never once suspended or warned by any social media outlet or
blogging platform at that time; it was treated as the political
speech about a public figure that it clearly and undeniably is. The
only thing that has changed since that time is the climate of
internet censorship.
Johnstone, like Cassandra Fairbanks, links "far left" and "far right" political ideologies: twitter.com/QuixotesHorse/…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/4iIy0NUNbX
I
also got a bunch of notifications like these from bot accounts as
soon as Orr shared the response to my tweet:
And
I’ve received furious, vitriolic notifications from Clintonite
Twitter accounts ever since, up until my account was shut down.
So
it looks like anyone who voices a political opinion that is deemed
sufficiently offensive to Centrist Twitter can be purged in this way
now.If
you can get enough people reporting the same thing over and over
again for a few days, one of those reports will eventually land in
the lap of an admin whose personal bias allows them to squint just
right at political speech about a public figure and see a violation
of Twitter policy.
I’ve
been writing
about the dangers
of internet censorship so
much lately because this is becoming a major problem. In a
corporatist system of government, wherein government power and
corporate power are not separated in any meaningful way, corporate
censorship is state censorship.
The
plutocratic class which effectively owns
the US government also owns
all the mass media,
allowing that plutocratic class to efficiently manipulate the way
Americans think and vote so as to manufacture
public consent for
the establishment status quo upon which those plutocratic empires are
built.
Whoever
controls the narrative controls the world. The
only cracks in plutocratic narrative control have come in the form of
alternative media outlets and social media, the access to which is
unfortunately guarded by plutocrats with well-documented ties
to secretive and unaccountable government agencies. The plutocratic
alliance has successfully funneled online audiences into platforms
that can be easily regulated, and now they are censoring those
platforms.
An
ungoverned media landscape would cripple the consent-manufacturing
propaganda machine of the ruling oligarchs, making us impossible to
manipulate and control. This
would give us our only real shot at ending the wars that the John
McCains of the world have devoted their lives to facilitating, our
only shot at creating true and authentic democracy, and our only shot
at turning the world around from the omnicidal, ecocidal trajectory
that these sociopathic oligarchs have us on.
They
can’t allow that. Their
rule depends upon it, and, historically, rulers do not give up power
willingly.
The
longer we wait to fight this, the more marginalized our voices
become, and the smaller our window to escape the cage they are
building around us shrinks. Make
your voices heard and refuse to consent to allowing a few Silicon
Valley plutocrats to manipulate public discourse in their own
interest. The time to act is now.
*
* *
Internet
censorship is closing in, so the best way to make sure you see the
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buying my book Woke:
A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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