An open letter from the WSWS: For an international coalition to fight Internet censorship

From WSWS:

The World Socialist Web Site has issued an open letter to all socialist, anti-war, left-wing and progressive websites, organizations and activists calling for an international coalition against Internet censorship. The letter states: "The United States government, in the closest collaboration with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other powerful information technology corporations, is implementing massive restrictions on Internet access to socialist, antiwar and progressive websites. Similar repressive policies are being enacted by capitalist governments in Europe and throughout the world. "The new regime of censorship is being combined with an intensification of surveillance operations, aimed at monitoring what people read, write and think while on the Internet. The actions of this alliance of the state, military-intelligence agencies and oligopolistic technology corporations are a dangerous threat to freedom of speech and other core democratic rights. "Under the fraudulent cover of eliminating “fake news” and “Russian meddling,” the technological scaffolding of a 21st century capitalist police state is being erected." It outlines a series of principles and tasks upon which an international campaign to oppose this regime of censorship can be based.  Read the full letter on the WSWS. Representatives of websites or organizations interested in joining the coalition should direct inquires to endcensorship@wsws.org. Individuals who want to participate in the work of the coalition should submit the form on this page. Fraternally, World Socialist Web Site   Twitter warns users: We're watching you By Andre Damon In an overt act of political intimidation, the social media platform Twitter emailed hundreds of thousands of users Saturday informing them that they had shared or followed “Russian propaganda.” Twitter made these claims without substantiation, refusing to tell its users exactly what content they shared or viewed that fell afoul of the US government and its social media enforcers. Among the recipients of the email was the Senate’s second-highest ranking Republican, John Cornyn.  Read more » Julian Assange calls effort of corporations to control Internet discourse “an existential threat to humanity” The following statement was sent by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the January 16 webinar Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship, featuring journalist Chris Hedges and WSWS Chairperson David North. Assange sent the statement from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been trapped for five and a half years. The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans. Between the democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence. While the internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities. I commend WSWS for drawing attention to this phenomena.  Read more » Share Tweet Forward World Socialist Web Site | wsws.org Articles: Copyright © 2017 wsws.org, All rights reserved.