by Elizabeth Vos, Disobedient Media:

Since Julian Assange was gagged earlier this year, state-sponsored censorship has attempted to snuff out the light of independent and alternative media voices from across the political spectrum. In the first half of August, this process appeared to escalate drastically. As Disobedient Media reported earlier this week, outlets from Infowars to Telesur have faced the wrath of technocratic social media giants.

The escalation of establishment censorship has been stunning. Just last week, former State Department official and whistleblower Peter Van Buren’s Twitter account was suspended under dubious circumstances. Consortium News wrote of his suspension:

“This week Van Buren had his Twitter account permanently shut down and seven years of his Tweets wiped from the record. Why? Because he challenged mainstream journalists who contested a Tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald that mainstream reporters support America’s wars and help bring them about. One corporate journalist decided to silence Van Buren by complaining to Twitter, which, within two days, and with no due process, obliged.”

Yesterday, independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone’s Twitter account was suspended before being reinstated within hours after a massive public backlash.

As Caitlin wrote after her suspension was lifted, a wave of lesser-known accounts, both conservative and left-leaning, have also been suspended in what has become a massive social media purge of dissenting thought. Johnstone commented on Twitter’s decision to reactivate her account, characterizing it as a tacit admission of a wrongful decision. This comment, in turn, appears to have led to a twelve-hour lockout.

The fact that @Twitter has tacitly admitted to wrongfully suspending my account makes me think about all the other accounts who get suspended that don’t have a large following to make a bunch of noise and object when they are silenced. Glad to be back, but this isn’t good enough. https://t.co/LLvFjt9gDw

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 18 August 2018

In her article discussing the incident, Johnstone noted that the tweets and articles at issue were consistent with previous articles and sentiments which, though controversial, had not resulted in the termination of her account. She wrote:

“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.”

Disobedient Media spoke with Caitlin Johnstone, asking her what she believes motivated the marked escalation in censorship over the last few weeks. She told us:

“The Silicon Valley billionaires which coordinate extensively with the US government are plainly a part of the ruling alliance between plutocrats and secretive government agencies. That alliance, which some refer to as the deep state, depends on its ability to propagandize us effectively to manufacture support for the plutocratic agendas of war, exploitation, ecocide and domestic espionage. It needs to control the media in order to manufacture consent for those agendas (which no ordinary person would otherwise support), and the internet has given rise to media platforms which are much harder to control than the mainstream media.

So they’ve been working to quickly manufacture consent for internet censorship, beginning with widely reviled soft targets like Alex Jones and manipulating the conversation to a debate about *who* should be censored instead of a debate about whether a handful of plutocrats should be permitted to censor the dominant platforms that society uses to communicate at all. From there, their goal is plainly to squeaze all dissenting voices as far away from large audiences as possible, one by one.

But they work to manufacture consent because they need that consent. If they don’t have it, the mask of freedom and democracy falls away, people lose trust in the propaganda machine, and the media psyops upon which the ruling power establishment is built become impossible. People refused to give their consent to my banning, speaking out with one voice across all political factions, I was reinstated, and someone at Twitter was probably reprimanded. Even people who don’t like me much spoke up, because they know they’re next in line. They found a huge collective “NO” to this, and they used it, and it worked. And I find that very encouraging.”

Accounts that rapidly challenged Johnstone’s suspension included but were not limited to Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, (whose account is currently run by his campaign) and many others, including this writer.

To provide additional context on Caitlin’s suspension, we return to the infamous Shareblue and events earlier this month, when Disobedient Media and others who have reported on the fallacies surrounding Guccifer 2.0 became the subjects of a disingenuous smear piece penned by journalist Duncan Campbell.

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