My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
The end of free speech in America?
After a few weeks away from blogging and some time out from the fray, I come back from a subdued Christmas to find the finishing bricks of the coup have been slamming into place. Wholesale censorship of any and all conservative and dissenting voices on all social media platforms have either been deleted or automatically stripped of followers. Of course, it started by Twitter banning Trump indefinitely, which gets rid of those 84M pesky people who voted for him and know in their hearts their vote was switched in the Big Steal. If their anger and outrage can’t be published, it therefore doesn’t exist, so it’ll be a happy and reconciled America from now on.
Will they knuckle under and accept the brutality?
He was the big voice to be silenced on Twitter but of course there have been many other lesser notables to fall victim to their big tech tyranny in the last two days. They too were either banned or stripped of followers. I wonder how deep that stripping of followers went. Have all those followers stripped off also been shadow banned? For those of you who might not be familiar with the term, shadow banning is flagging a person’s comments so they’re only visible to them but not to anyone else. It’s the sort of simple broad sweep move that would appeal to every fanatics sense of having complete and rigid control over other people.
At the same time, a concerted assault by Silicon Valley on independent free speech platforms such as Parler and Gab has been mounted. In Parler’s case, their platform is hosted on equipment owned by a subsidiary of Amazon, which itself is owned by the American oligarch Jeff Bezos, so they just yanked it out from under them. How long they’ve been given to move the site is anyone’s guess but one thing is for sure, finding another company to host it quickly will be difficult because of the malign influence exerted by the big tech cartel on smaller service companies. Obliging Parler in its hour of need has to be weighed against the very real damage big tech would certainly do to their business.
The assault on Gab has been different simply because it doesn’t rely on big tech very much for various historical reasons. What happened to it in the beginning was that the site had to be move from hosting service to hosting service because of big tech pressure on the host companies. In the end, they had to take the hard option of stumping up their own money to host the site on their own servers. The same pressure was brought to bear on the companies who would ordinarily have provided services such as banking facilities and donation mechanisms to Gab. The big ones simply wouldn’t or were afraid to supply services to an enemy of the big tech and the great reset being planned.
Given such a hard birth, Gab is therefore mostly immune to the deplatforming moves being used against Parler, who should have known better than to rely on any service provided by the dictators of big tech. Short term, Parler might have some severe difficulties staying in operation. The attack on Gab has had to be different because of its relative independence. It’s been flooded by extremists pretending to be Trump supporters and all advocating violence in the wake of the Washington protest on the 6th. Andrew Torba, Gab’s boss and a true patriot who long ago saw the direction big tech was heading in, banned all of them but not before execrable fake news outlets like the NY Times used it as an excuse to call for Gab to be shut down for inciting violence.
Given recent events, the number of new registrations in the past few days at both Gab and Parler have gone astronomical. Pray that their infrastructure can take that amount of sudden stress because otherwise we’ve just lost two of the last remaining sources of truth in America. It’s only a matter of time until WhatsApp users get treated similarly.
Your masters have spoken. There must be no platform for any voice of dissent.
©Pointman
Related articles by Pointman:
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Pointman's 
It’s sad days, and I fear the worst is yet to come. Both for the Trump and the world at large..
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On WhatsApp – In a few weeks, all WhatsApp members will have ALL – repeat ALL – of their details ported to its FarceBook owner. The extreme convenience of WhatsApp for communicating with a relatively small group (like our retirement village, for example) has attracted numerous users who wouldn’t be seen DEAD on FarceBook. The ‘fact’ that WhatsApp supposedly encrypts all its messages probably doesn’t mean anything to the OWNER of the encryption! Anyway, it’s all the addresses, cellphone numbers, and the flow of data (if not its content) that’s important to the marketers. There was a series of programs on TV some years ago about the Internet, and the final program was “The Cost Of Free”. You have been warned!
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Good morning Pointman. Welcome back. I have been closely following events in the last few days, or at least trying to. It’s hard to know what’s real any more, but the shear speed and magnitude of what’s happening is quite frightening.
I have no idea if there is a “master plan”, but I find it hard to believe that Trump would not have foreseen it coming to this. Interesting days lie ahead.
Thank you for continuing to put your voice out there.
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Gab’s traffic reported up 750% today. Massive server upgrades taking place.
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Body Language – Air Force Lieutenant General, Thomas McInerney
January 10, 2021
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cross posted at https://freedomaustralia.freeforums.net/thread/715/end-free-speech-america
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With “the fall” of America it would appear that the entire West, with some honourable exceptions, is now behind enemy lines.
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Pointman,
All the best to you and yours.
Would you mind having a go at explaining how Google, Facebook, Twitter has value?
What is their value to service, so to speak.
Ireland was the country of choice for many wanting to gain access to EU types but many have also selected New Zealand for whatever other reasons and prior, or current, was Singapore!
Are there so many businesses online willing to pay Microsoft and Alphabet and whomever because that is the only way you can do business anymore?
Is the future really about the “data estate” rather than the “real estate”?
who really owns “the Market Place”?
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