A monopolistic Silicon Valley mega-corporation deleting political speech about an important historical figure because Washington says he was a terrorist is a notably brazen act of censorship.
Qasem Soleimani in 2018. (EPA/EPA-EFE/Iranian Supreme Leader’s Office)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Listen to a reading of this article.
Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda.
The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of U.S. sanctions and must therefore be removed.
In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization.
Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.
Instagram just deleted all my posts (around 20 photos) of my tweets on General Soleimani, threatening to ban me. Unsurprising. This is really just Big Tech censorship at the behest of the government. pic.twitter.com/edIA0O9SJE
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) January 4, 2022
We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is, in alignment with U.S. government decrees, censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure.
Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from U.S. government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.
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I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it sink in. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the U.S. government said it’s not allowed.
Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”
This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the U.S. government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy.
A monopolistic Silicon Valley mega-corporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the U.S. government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.
Despite being 100% factually accurate, Facebook censored my video on how Soleimani led Iran's fight against ISIS and demonetized @IntheNow_tweet's account. Apparently the truth violated "Community Standards". For now, you can watch the segment here: https://t.co/Z1qz11Ro9T pic.twitter.com/0qOCYKHq6E
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) January 15, 2020
The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.
The U.S. government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.
Every evil the U.S. accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretense of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The U.S. government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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This all seems, pretty obviously to me, exactly what happens when anyone wishing to flex their authoritarian brain cells falls to the demands of the “Deep State” mentality, or what ever soothes their troubled minds.
This of course would be the thoughts of those mental midgets feeling uneasy about the truth, simply in disagree with proven factual fact patterns. Could be their troubled minds become very restless when events do not represent their opinions. Opinions based on the very real craving to “get their way”
The exact same mechanism the CIA uses to avoid criticism. Secrecy! The country is being strangled by censorship. Unwarranted, needlessly applied, unhealthy censorship.
Driven by the flawed mentality of the authoritarian fascist.
Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi During a December 14, 2008 press conference threw both of his shoes at George W. Bush.
If we could show our dissatisfaction with the current US Policy by mailing in our foot ware would that help?
Caitlin, she tells it like it is….and thats why I like her. A breath of fresh air.
This one essay is perfection. Thank you so much!
The integration of the US internet monopolies Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Zoom, and others with the MIC (Military industrial Complex) is intended to extend and strengthen US ownership of the Internet enabling it to utilise a coercive power of enormous potential to militarise digital space converting it into a conflict zone where the instruments of censorship and information or hybrid warfare will be used to enforce US cultural hegemony and the dominance of transnational global capital under US protection. This selective censorship of social media is indicative of the convergence of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon into a global internet police force for Western Monopoly Capitalism and its war economies.
“Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody,”
I think we should agree that is minimizing Soleimani’s influence. He was a beloved military leader and his martyrdom could inspire resistance and payback for decades.
In this and much other censorship involving issues of the Middle East, Iran, Israel, etc., I suggest the US Jewish Lobby has much to do with it. The Israeli Jews are constantly pressuring us to attack Iran, and they routinely bomb surrounding countries in violation of International Law. Israeli supremacy is important to US Israel Lobby, and all this censorship is enabled by this Lobby, which foists its propaganda on both the US government and the US population, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The Lobby is very successful at achieving censorship of dissident views about what these Israeli Jews are doing, making up a huge part of what the media calls “neo-liberal censorship.” The Lobby is tremendously successful at it, and in fact, I’ll probably be censored for even suggesting this, though I hope I’m wrong. (Please?)
You are spot on!
Thank you Australia, for producing some of the most fearless defenders of human rights that I know of. John Pilger, Julian Assange, and Caitlin Johnstone are the first that come to mind, but there must be many others.
Key U.S. legislators have relentlessly hounded social media companies to do the government’s dirty work for them, that is, silence political dissent, or else become the target of federal prosecutions for monopolistic practices, that is, have their financial legs broken if they didn’t play along.
When he was ambushed, Soleimani was in Iraq to attempt a rapprochment between Saudi Arabia and Iran, something that U.S. imperialists must have considered a serious threat to U.S. global domination. Apparently, Soleimani made no attempt to conceal his whereabouts or the nature of his mission. In that respect, he underestimated the treachery and brazenness of his enemies, while perhaps overestimating their intelligence and sophistication. It wasn’t difficult to foresee that he and his cause would only be strengthened by his martyrdom.
Never, ever, should the world forget the U.S. coup that overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953 in order to replace it with a U.S. puppet terrorist regime.
Most of all, never, ever, should we forget President Trump’s threat to the Iranian people if they dared to retaliate for the cold-blooded murder of one of their greatest leaders: “the United States will hit 52 Iranian sites, some at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture, very fast and very hard.”
One of those rare moments when the true nature of American imperialism stood revealed in all its horror, much like the English monarchy bestowing highest honors on the war criminal Tony Blair… henceforth to be addressed as “Sir” war criminal Tony Blair.
Caitlin, you’re absolutely right about everything except this:
“…Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.”
Martyrs have always been powerful symbols in the fight against any sort of repressive regime. The US certainly does not want any of their victims to be widely recognized as a martyr, hence the need for censorship. Not that Soleimani was ever likely to be accepted as a martyr in the West, but censoring his story serves the dual purpose of completely removing that possibility, and normalizing censorship in general.
Well said by both you and David Horsman. Other than that statement, Caitlin is on target, as usual.
I love that last sentence….!
Burn Meta BURN!!!
Her final paragraph is so accurate that I had to copy and paste it – she gets right to the point of US hypocrisy.
“Every evil the U.S. accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretense of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The U.S. government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.”
Yup. Censorship is rampant. Can’t even mention ivermectin on Common Dreams now. Big Pharma, Big Media, & the MIC control everything.
Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
Bravo!
Capitalistique oppression unmasqued …
Thankyou & keep writing.