[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] Twitter Restores Assange Activism Account In Response To Backlash

[J.B. Nicholson]

 From the #Unity4J Announcement:
> The @Unity4J Twitter Team would like to announce that we have been
> officially restored!
> 
> Remember, the goal of all political dissent is to get dissident ideas
> into mainstream consciousness. If we all vacate the areas where the
> mainstream public are spending their time, we're doing the social
> engineers' job for them by quarantining ourselves to some isolated
> fringe sector of the internet. That's exactly what they want us to do.
> They want us to remove ourselves so we can't infect the mainstream herd
> with wrongthink.
> 
> So don't do it for them. If they're going to keep clamping down on
> dissident speech online, force them to do it out in the open where
> everyone can see. As we've just witnessed, they have a much, much harder
> time conducting censorship while under the light of public scrutiny.

Unity4J isn't "forcing" anything, they are still operating at the whim of 
their chosen censors -- Twitter, in this case. People posting exclusively 
to any one system (including this mailing list) are subject to being 
censored with no reliable recourse. If they were "forcing" their way, then 
it becomes hard to explain why people who want to hear from Alex Jones are 
so unsuccessful in similarly forcing the reversal of the coordinated 
censorship he recently saw.

Unity4J's interpretation of events seems to ignore what just happened to 
their account and could happen again (highlighting how impotent their 
"force" really is). Their claim doesn't get into the lack of accountability 
to the censors because they don't have the power to hold anyone 
accountable. Private interests don't owe you freedom of speech and the 
Internet's greatest triumph over free speech as a principle is that you 
can't do anything on the Internet without involving private interests.

A better approach would be to disseminate messages through multiple systems 
including one's own blog. That way no one sysadmin gets censor power over 
one's messages. If one system is somehow not available, your messages are 
still posted elsewhere. I do this for myself on 
https://digitalcitizen.info/ and I invite you to host your own blog as 
well. This widespread distribution is one of the key advantages of 
widely-circulated netnews groups (like those on Usenet) -- if one server 
won't let you post, you can find another server that will.

Unity4J could use this reprieve from Twitter censorship to let their 
readers know where else their messages can be found.

This is the philosophy being put into action by those who choose 
decentralization and posting to multiple systems. Mastodon is one such 
decentralized messaging system; it's a free software Twitter-like system 
(see https://joinmastodon.org/ for details). Mastodon is said to make it 
easy to federate with other instances of Mastodon (the "fediverse": a 
portmanteau of 'federated' and 'universe') so sets of users can have 
conversations while each users' chat is not able to be easily censored 
(except by the system hosting one's instance of Mastodon).

Mastodon's current developers aren't for free speech as a principal; see 
https://archive.fo/0JFR9 -- their ridiculous statement on Gab.com switching 
from using its own software to using Mastodon.

Quoting their announcement:
> The Mastodon community does not approve of their attempt to hijack our
> infrastructure and has already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate
> speech off the fediverse.

This is a baseless claim made on behalf of countless others. Any serious 
recognition of free speech has to include those who say things you don't 
agree with. That's what free speech is for. No such use of Mastodon is 
"hijacking" Mastodon any more than someone objectionable using a web server 
is "hijacking" the web; if you don't want to link to Gab.com discussions, 
then don't.

But the software they write respects your software freedom (which is the 
freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software). 
Mastodon is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. One can 
put aside Mastodon's wretched politics and enjoy the free software.

-J