{"id":241,"date":"2017-11-22T13:08:54","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T13:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/?p=241"},"modified":"2018-01-03T14:56:51","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T14:56:51","slug":"241","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/2017\/11\/22\/241\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissent Under Attack – Mainstream Media and Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"
Note: The following tekst is the middle part of \"Dissent Under Attack by Government and Corporations\"<\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0 By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers\u00a0on Globalresearch.org<\/pre>\n
\"Free<\/p>\n
Attacks on the Media and Internet<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Critical to the success of movement actions is drawing public attention to them. A goal of popular movements is to grow by attracting more people to the movement, and especially to divide power holders (e.g. political parties, elected officials, business people, the media) and bring them to support the movement. A key ingredient to accomplish these goals is the public knowing about the protest, which requires media attention.<\/p>\n
The corporate mass media has always been a problem for movements seeking transformational change. At times, movements\u00a0have been able to break through corporate media blockades and get their message out, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as\u00a0mass media is further concentrated<\/a>\u00a0and controlled by government and big business.<\/p>\n
The Internet has been the great equalizer allowing people to create their own media through video, websites, and live stream and\u00a0share them through social media. Now, that is under attack.<\/p>\n
The founder of the Internet,\u00a0Tim Berners-Lee\u2019s vision for an \u201copen platform<\/a>\u00a0[is one] that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries.\u201d Today he sees the Internet going into some \u201cnasty storms,\u201d including the erosion of Net Neutrality, which will allow Internet providers to be gatekeepers and determine where people can go, what they can see and how quickly they can see it. He also notes the use of algorithms to control what people can find in web searches and he worries about click-bait advertising pushing fake news, which is sometimes done by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Berners-Lee writes that\u00a0\u201cNet neutrality<\/a>,\u00a0which some have described as the \u2018first amendment of the internet,\u2019\u201d is being threatened by\u00a0Verizon employee Ajit Pai who President Trump nominated to be FCC chairman. Pai just announced the\u00a0FCC plans to vote on December 14\u00a0to remove\u00a0Net Neutrality<\/a>\u00a0rules that were won in 2015.<\/p>\n
Join our\u00a0Protect The Internet campaign<\/a>\u00a0and take action at this critical time.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0if you can come to DC to protest the vote.<\/p>\n
Berners-Lee believes \u201cthe internet should remain a \u2018permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression.\u2019\u201d ISP\u2019s should not be able to pick winners and losers or throttle services that they oppose or who do not pay enough money, rather they should be treated like public utilities that provide equal service to everyone.<\/p>\n
In addition to mass media being more concentrated, Russiagate\u00a0is being used as an excuse to weaken alternative media, like Russia Today (RT), the US-based Russian network.\u00a0Chris Hedges describes<\/a>\u00a0RT being required to register as a foreign agent as a horrendous blow to press freedom. Hedges puts it into the context of the clamp down on\u00a0dissent, writing it is \u201cdriven by RT America\u2019s 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 . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
Popular Resistance has been affected by\u00a0the new algorithms<\/a>,\u00a0with a decline in our readership by 60 percent since they were instituted. That\u2019s why we need you to share our articles on social media so we can reach more people.<\/p>\n
Congress\u00a0is playing its role in heightening fear in order to quiet criticism of the government on social media. At a recent hearing,\u00a0Clint Watts, a retired Army officer who purports to be an expert on Russiagate<\/a>, testified that there needs to be a government-imposed censorship of the media. He demanded that \u201cgovernment news inquisitors drive dissident media off the internet.\u201d No elected official responded negatively to his call for censorship.<\/p>\n
In fact,\u00a0Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate used hearings focused on social media outlets<\/a>\u00a0to call for censorship.\u00a0They used extreme language to describe social media\u00a0with Senator Feinstein\u00a0calling it \u201ccyber warfare.\u201d\u00a0Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff<\/strong>, after describing Russian influence in the media, went on to say \u201cits not just foreign\u201d accusing Facebook and Twitter algorithms as having the \u201cconsequence of widening divisions among our society.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google testified that\u00a0they\u00a0fact check labels to spot fake news testifying, \u201cat Google search, we have updated our quality guidelines and evaluations to help surface more authoritative content from the web.\u201d He was describing the new Google search algorithms that result in sites like\u00a0ours being undermined by suppressing our articles when people search terms.<\/p>\n
The \u201cfake news\u201d meme is being used to curtail foreign media, independent media and social media even though we know that the most common source of false news comes from the corporate mass media. They put forward the news from the perspective of the government and big corporations to support the concentration of wealth and militarism, among other issues. Part of our job as activists is to point out their lies and falsehoods.\u00a0Responding to the attack on RT,\u00a0peace activist and former Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka<\/strong> wrote<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post\u00a0should be required to register as \u201cagents of capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
The remaining and beginning parts of this article, can be read on globalresearch.org<\/a><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Note: The following tekst is the middle part of “Dissent Under Attack by Government and Corporations”,\u00a0\u00a0 By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers\u00a0on Globalresearch.org Attacks on the Media and Internet Critical to the success of movement actions is drawing public attention to them. A goal of popular movements is to grow by attracting more people to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fpsn.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}