Internet Politics 📍

How platforms alter history

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How platforms alter history

"What’s behind that impulse to delete? When it comes to acts of violence, taking down profiles may help stem the impulse to try and build a logical case for an act where logic played no role. Distancing a platform from a senseless act of violence may be a public relations move, or a matter of taste, or maybe meant to discourage a profile from becoming a shrine for copycats. But the act has rare precedence in less recent history, and even carries negative connotations with non-online examples — say, if no one were allowed to read the Unabomber’s letters."

"Norms around social media are still evolving, and the urge to delete the profiles of wrongdoers has evolved over time. Surprisingly, the Twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, was never taken down, even after he received the death penalty in 2015."

RT America Torched in Witch Hunt ’17

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RT America Torched in Witch Hunt ’17

"In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)."

"The assault on RT America, on which I host the show “On Contact,” has nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is driven by RT America’s decision to provide a platform to critics of American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since April. Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list of “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all advertising by the channel."

"Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced."

New Google algorithm restricts access to left-wing, progressive web sites

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New Google algorithm restricts access to left-wing, progressive web sites

"In the three months since Internet monopoly Google announced plans to keep users from accessing “fake news,” the global traffic rankings of a broad range of left-wing, progressive, anti-war and democratic rights organizations have fallen significantly."

"On April 25, 2017, Google announced that it had implemented changes to its search service to make it harder for users to access what it called “low-quality” information such as “conspiracy theories” and “fake news.”