A WARNING TO THE INTREPID! - The Chilling Effect of Corporate Social Media Censorship and the Matriarchal State

Recently I found myself apparently guilty of 'hate speech' in one of my own administered Facebook Groups (as if its members were not all known to me and sophisticated adults). It was, of course, nothing of the kind (see below). I have had similar experiences with the comments allowed (or rather not allowed) on The Guardian and Financial Times. Others have had similar experiences here on Blogger. In my most recent case, this was expressed as a threat to the very existence of the Group. Nothing happened of course, the 'offending' item simply disappeared, murdered by either an algorithm or some young under-paid dim-wit in some back office but the threat got me thinking about the 'chilling effect' on freedom of speech from such implied threats. 

 

Perhaps the 'West' may not be a patriarchal authoritarian 'tyranny' like China or Russia (at least as they are seen in our popular mythology) but is instead becoming a manipulative matriarchal variant. Perhaps it is deviously in the process of becoming more totalitarian by stealth than its 'evil' (apparently) rivals. Instead of having clear rules with clear punishments (which I can deal with) we have the mauvaise foi of desperate attempts to tell us we are all free (which is only a half truth at the best of times) and then exert social control through hints and passive aggression, weak threats and subtle pressures to effect behaviour change. In psychological terms we have the worst of the traditionalist masculine in one bloc replaced by the worst of the traditionalist feminine in the the other. 

 

Our authorities seem to be too weak to control us directly. They do it through pressure exerted through corporate mummies and institutional set-ups. Daddy is a coward so Mummy has to be brought in to exert discipline over the kids (that's us, folks!). Like good little children in a conservative household, we are shamed into compliance or made guilty after the fact or (if we are to have any fun or freedom or learning experience) we have to become devious law and rule breakers hoping to get away with a bit of naughtiness and not get caught. It is not only our behaviour and language that is controlled in this way within a rather weird liberal/progressive pseudo-theocracy but increasingly our thoughts (something the 'tyrannies' actually do not tend to tamper with). 

 

We have to be right thinkers in order to ensure right speech and right behaviour because Daddy (the State) is too weak and cowardly to wield the whip and impose good behaviour let alone good speech on us. In the eyes of our political culture we are not adults but children who have to be frightened, cajoled, rewarded and lied to in order to ensure that we do not go wild and ask all the questions that developing children should be asking about authority and our environment. Our punishments are generally light - exile, isolation, exclusion - rather than the Gulag. Everybody just takes it on the chin not realising that they are frogs slowly being boiled on the hob. The Western State is the ultimate bad parent no less than the Eastern tyranny - in our case, the absent father who relies on the corporate mother to bring up the children.

 

In fact, there was probably no immediate danger to the Facebook Group in question although I am sure there are people (including the usual suspects in the psy-ops fraternity) who would love to close the Group down. What was happening was a 'warning' designed to weaken the force of inconvenient debate and to confirm that our freedom existed on sufferance and not by right. The Group in question consistently challenges the given narratives about events in the bloodlands to the East whose mismanagement threatens us all with nuclear immolation. In fact, much of that debate has, in any case, shifted to Telegram which, of course, Keir Starmer wants to close down as a 'progressive' (God help us!). Perhaps he thinks Number Ten is a walk in if only he can appear more conservative and authoritarian than the failed and confused Conservatives. Depressingly, he may be right. Most voters seem terrified of real freedom.

 

Perhaps I should suggest caution in particular uses of emotional but still non-harmful language and let the algorithms train us like a dog owner trains its hound but I am disinclined to give way.  If my Group members are courageous enough to defy the imposed narratives about (say) the 'War' as other Groups' members in my territory are courageous enough to defy given narratives about politicised science and art, diversity and even equality or gender and identity, because they think for themselves in reasoned and intelligent ways, then I am 'd----d' if I am going to act like Mummy's proxy. I would rather kill off the Groups entirely when that day comes, stick to Telegram until they destroy that too, cultivate my garden and wait for the whole system to implode as all sclerotic cultures eventually do. I am old enough not to care over much if Western civilisation collapses under the weight of its own malice and ineptitude.

 

As I say, there was no hate in the relevant comment. It simply made the point that I opposed conscription by any Government under all but the most extreme circumstances and possibly not then. I made it clear that I would be personally protective of anyone evading conscription if at all possible no matter which country they came from. Facebook may simply have taken exception to a standard and rather mild British expletive (never forget that Facebook comes out of an American psychological and cultural bubble) which was directed at State entities and certainly not at individuals or identity groups. It was a mild expletive found elsewhere on Facebook without effect so perhaps suspicions should be roused about another agenda. To be fair, the algorithms do not seem to be very bright (although in saying that perhaps that I am demonstrating hate speech towards algorithms!). AI is unlikely to improve things since the people who are programming AI are the people trying to control our mental mapping.

 

Be aware that all the big social media sites except perhaps Truth Social and Twitter (and this last is looking uncertain after the latest CEO appointment) are running scared at the moment as the European Union and the British Government are intending or undertaking major legislative campaigns to 'control' what information we can have access to. This is not such a problem in the US with its First Amendment although those freedoms are also under constant lawfare pressure from 'liberals' and the Federal State. There is a tinge of Emergency Powers legislation lurking in the anterooms of some of these campaigns since we seem to be positioned in a 'phoney war' situation that could turn into a shooting war at any instance without any of us having much of a say in the matter any more than we did in 1914 or 1939. 

 

Elites know that there is substantial doubt about where we are heading and a lot of resistance to the narrative that they wish to promote. The mainstream media, of course, are broadly on side with that narrative as they were on, say, Vietnam for the bulk of that war. This time around, social media provides an alternative narrative that almost certainly reflects social reality - society in general is quite simply more indifferent to claims about Ukraine and Russia than people like Ben Wallace and Tom Tugendhat would like. There are larger oppositional minorities at this stage in the context between our empires than at the equivalent stage of (say) the Vietnam imbroglio.

 

The evident fear in the system is that populations could switch from a large majority for the elite narrative to a large majority against it (which is exactly what happened in the Vietnam War in the US) and so destabilise a system that was put in position in stages over some seventy years to benefit large-scale capital and a self-reinforcing political caste and which is now failing abysmally in terms of both cultural governance and economic stability. Controlling social media and encrypted communications like Whats App, Telegram and Signal are becoming of vital importance to established political elites as Starmer's outburst in the Commons has indicated.

 

That switch in sentiment in the Vietnam War, in a country where free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, took place in barely nine months and changed history without benefit of social media so we can see why they are rattled in the White House, Brussels and Whitehall. The existing system in the UK and Europe has a great deal at stake in using any weapon at its disposal to ensure that it does not lose control of power or policy, citing in an exaggerated way both disinformation and particular and real but still often marginal forms of abuse as excuses for increased social control of the free social media. 

 

Instead of Daddy moving on on the abuses directly (after all, it is a bit rich for the British State to claim moral guardianship after its sustained failure to deal with care home child abuse or widespread fraud), the legal framework is created to frighten Mummy into doing the job for it. Major platforms have to be complicit in this because they are businesses and not public services. The legislative and regulatory power of existing elites is sufficient to seriously affect their profitability and a recession may well be on the way. They have no option in the game of survival.

 

Certainly, as Mick Lynch pointed out today, the working population and even the lower middle classes are getting much poorer even as the asset rich get richer and while large corporations make ever-increasing profits on high inflation and war booty. Algorithms too are just defensive blunt instruments that can be designed to be 'conservative' (in fact, 'conservatism' is the cultural liberal agenda and the 'progressive' business-friendly politics that got us into the mess we are in in the first place) and defensive of corporate interests.

 

In short, you cannot take your freedom of expression for granted nor your ownership of your invested information on social platforms nor that arbitrary power will not be exercised to exclude you from a platform if you cannot behave along prescribed lines. If I get censored again (I do not intend to be deliberately provocative but I will never hide my honest opinon reasonably expressed), then you know it is political.

The Press - Problem Rather Than Solution

Those who know their Heidegger will be aware of the concept of Gerede or 'idle chatter', the fallen and inauthentic mode of speech used in every day life. In fact we cannot do without it. It is essential to social cohesion which is an inauthentic necessity as far as the individual is concerned but has its own authenticity as one element amongst many in constructing a framework of relations within which individuality can express itself. To speak of 'Gerede' is not to take a moral or value standard against it but simply to note that it is fallen and inauthentic in respect to 'Dasein' - the human being whose mind cannot be known by other minds and who cannot know other minds and (to express the grim aspect of Heideggerian philosophy) must face their own death alone. This aloneness of death applies to the late Queen Elizabeth II as much as to the man who dies more obviously alone in a hospice in some small town without relatives or friends. Social Gerede includes our commentary on the deaths of others and their doings. 

What does all this have to do with the media? Only that our responses to events as social chatter have always had to deal with a 'higher level' of inauthenticity and fallen-ness which is the chittter-chatter of journalists and intellectuals as 'public discourse' where the cohesion being encouraged is not that of the ordinary human relations designed to help us get things done in the world and survive but the cohesion of a ruling caste that is simultaneously determined on its own hegemony and terrified of losing control of the chatter in case loss collapses that hegemony. The recent Coronation of King Charles II was an object lesson in these matters - private reactions bonding families and communities at the lowest level in a dialectic with a myth in which ancient mystery had been replaced with the magic of 'glamour' and a higher level traditional discourse that bonded society through the marriage of Church and State and the subordination of the political to the socially cohesive irrational.

The mediation between these worlds is (as the word implies) the media but how many of us were thoroughly irritated by the inane chatter from journalists that we heard before, during and after the Coronation - and that we hear before, during and after every major event, inbetween the music we hear on radio and programmed as nothing more than inane chatter on broadcast channels and in newspaper columns. This mental wall paper, democratised through social media (which mainstream journalists use but deeply resent as rival to their hegemonic control of information flows and opinion), is not only inane but serves a dysfunction in simultaneously communicating socially cohesive messaging from above while anarchically destabilising society in order to provide more fuel for the chatter. 

As fossil fuels are said to pollute and heat up our planet so the sheer scale of inane chatter pollutes and heats up our society - and yet, despite the fact that we are told we must restrict ourselves in the use of carbon, there is no attempt to restrain or manage this inane chatter which might be likened to a memetic Ponzi Scheme with the worst offenders now demanding social restrictions on potential worse offenders to come to protect their own collapsing monopoly on idiocy. The mainstream media, in short, and the politicians, in their attacks on the platforms are not interested in turning inane chatter into something educational, analytical, factual and thoughtful but only in preserving their own right to offer what they see as a vaguely more rational form of inanity rather than give that right of inanity to all of us.

Some months ago, journalists got terribly excited about some of their type being picked up by the police at a highly disruptive eco-demonstration. Journalists like to stoke outrage in their readers but are never so outraged as when one of their own gets into trouble. I am not interested here in the specific case. I don't know the facts of an essentially trivial incident any more than I care about George Galloway's or Matt Hancock's appearances on popular TV shows. The probability is that, under pressure, the police made a mistake which they then had to unwind, that the 'Press' were intrusive on an operation in which perhaps lives and certainly individual safety were at stake and that there was no intention whatsoever by the 'State' to limit the freedom of the Press on that day and in that place. 

More concerning should be that a pub which represented the livelihood of a family has had to close down because a couple of holier-than-thou corporations refused to supply them with key product thanks to publicity about a stupid police raid on their collection of golliwogs. The politicians caused the police to blunder, the media created hysteria and the 'corporate liberals' stepped in to destroy a small business. That is the 'regime' in a nutshell - confused authority, inept politicians, narcissistic journalists and complicit Uriah Heep-like capitalists creating a vortex of destruction for the 'little man'. 

We might also cite the idiocy around the Oath of Allegiance to the Coronation. It always was voluntary. It was a relatively minor addition to the Service put forward in good faith by Church and Crown almost certainly at the behest of the former (which has been busy turning the event into a soft power assertion of its own authority). An oath is serious to some (mostly to the military). Trivial to others (mostly the public). It was a nice idea for traditionalists without negative implications for sceptics. If you can't say it, don't take up your invitation to Westminster Abbey and stay silent at home. The media turned something voluntary, restricted in force to a few hundred people in an Abbey and private for most people into a divisive 'story', adding yet another brick of negativity into our dying culture.

In the eco-case, the poor Plods were trying to find a way to restore the freedom to travel safely of significant numbers of people while not endangering the life of any narcissist who decided to protest at their expense. The arrests of protesters before the Coronation are more troubling perhaps except that, on further thought, this tiny minority of activists were not actually putting forward arguments for republicanism and creating a political organisation capable of winning elections to impose it in accordance with the will of the people but simply ruining the day for a lot of other people and risking violence and disorder during a difficult high security operation. After all, there are some worse people even than activists and journalists out there.

 

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the police are on the verge of imposing monarchical tyranny (rather than rank stupidity) and perhaps the Press are the only effective barrier between ourselves and authoritarian rule but I think not. England is England, marked out more by blunders than malice. The Press have no interest but advertising revenue, jobs for journalists, telling tales (rather than the mysterious 'truth') and allowing their posher end to rant at their owners' expense. The frustration for the public was that the eco-protests caused real distress and misery for many individuals and that they existed in good part because of a collusive relationship between protesters and the media, creating a vicious cycle in which more outrageous protests get more publicity which encourages more protests. Instead of a cycle of socially cohesive idle chatter with space for criticism, a transmission belt from below as well as from above in stabilising society and reforming it, we have cycles of inane chatter which destroy social cohesion and block off intelligent analytical criticism of society when and wherever it fails. There is a sound criticism of monarchy in the UK and there are dipshit protesters at the margins and the latter always destroy the ability of the former to be heard.

Here is another example. If you believed the media, the Passport Office is in total disarray and the civil service is falling apart. This is the accepted version doled out to people with no immediate connection to the service based on the complaints of the few in a genuinely complex system. Yet, in our household, two passport applications were handled effectively within three weeks and my request for some facts on pension arrangements was delivered in writing within the promised time-scale. Freedom increasingly seems to be defined by the 'right' of activists to engage in performative street 'art' at the expense of others and by the 'right' of the media to tell 'stories' where stories are as likely to mean 'lies' as the word is often used in popular parlance as not. The half-baked accounts of the Ukraine War are simply the relation of one-sided dossiers issued by psychological operations specialists. NGOs produce 'papers' designed to manipulate. Journalists lap up PR material. We live in a miasma of story-telling.

 

This 'freedom' to engage in a concatenation of half-truths helps to enable a presumed right to interfere in other peoples' lives, insult their values beyond fair reason (of which Pussy Riot behaving badly in an Russian Orthodox Church must be exemplar) and place people at risk. All on the dubious basis that (for example) direct extreme action (say) got the women the vote as opposed to reliance on civil disobedience, peaceful protest and political action ... you know, the hard way but the sure way. African-American strategies to win civil rights are models of their kind in which major social change took place because a mass of people (like women) needed it and not because a few crusties or obsessives wanted it. In fact, extreme direct action put back the suffragette movement whose final victory was inevitable on the strength of the social forces involved.

 

We have seen a similar destructive relationship between terrorism and the media. Terrorists can be assured of sometimes hysterical coverage creating fear and anxiety that then expresses itself in over-reaction by the authorities who then restrict the civil liberties of everyone except the media who are at the root of creating the initial crisis of anxiety in the first place. Unlike most people, I am not hysterical about terrorism. Exhausted doctors and truck drivers are more of a threat to me and my family than loons with a bomb. But the Islamist errorist wave of the 1990s and 2000s was never adequately analysed in the media as a) the fruit of inept foreign policy, b) a marginal threat to the vast majority of the population for the vast majority of the time, c) an opportunity to whip up hysteria by special interests to ensure budgetary allocations and d) a greater opportunity for ambitious technocrats to get their noses in the trough. The media never really exposed a) or made b) clear and were wholly complicit in the pursuing the ambitions of those concerned with c) and d).

 

It seems that terrorism was also a terribly convenient excuse for the authorities to impose excessive surveillance and social controls and to build huge industrial-security complexes creating jobs for the pals. The media have been as important in creating a less pleasant and authoritarian society as they have been in stoking up the war-mongering of the neo-cons and the absurd foreign policies of a bunch of NATO incompetents. Radically, I would go so far as to say that the role of the media is also to ensure that we forget the right of violent resistance where there is a radical imbalance of power and where power resides in an authority that is not accountable to its subjects. Let me explain the issue here which is that any regime must work or be subject to the Mandate of Heaven and fall. Western liberal democracy today and its accountability is a Potemkin Village, We have reached the tragic point where only the media may be gluing the paper together at the same time as it is playing with matches around it. 

 

The media have taken on the role of making power accountable on paper but they do nothing of the kind in actuality. Indeed, the media is part of Power. Its interest tends to be merely in maintaining politics as a soap opera and getting political scalps in an eternal game of political musical chairs. National liberation remains a worthy struggle as does the overthrow of tyrannies from within (without foreign interference) or foreign occupation but, honestly, Britain today is, if anything, at the other end of the tyrannical spectrum, not a tyranny but an unstable mess. What we need now is to face this fact and start to reform how we do things within our ancient traditions where they do not get in the way. It is the media that are getting in the way.

 

Britain is a failing State led by bunglers but with the opportunity for us all (even if inadequately taken) to overthrow the bunglers through effective political organisation and persuade the slightly less stupid bunglers through argument and peaceful protest. Of course, the fact that we invariably replace one set of bunglers with another is not the point ... being a democracy, we could theoretically remove all bunglers if we were not so lazy, distracted and poorly educated even if we did not do so. We willnot do so because we are lazy, distracted and poorly educated and that's just how it goes. But we could still have a more effective, more intelligent and more capable elite whose first allegiance was, at least in principle, to the People rather than to its own class or to the liberal internationalist and neoliberal ideologies that got us into the mess we are in in the first place.

 

A strong State serving a strong People would place social cohesion alongside justifiable analytical criticism (not emotional performance art) at a premium. The media has become complicit in our collective weakness and so complicit in the dodgy panicked attempts of the authorities to plug holes in the dam holding back anarchy instead of building new and stronger dams. Our freedoms are in danger because of the media more than we will accept. As we say, the issue must be whether our ruling caste has the Mandate of Heaven or not. If it does, it should be accepted, If it does not, it should be overthrown. We are at the point, thanks to weak politicians, narcissistic activists and the media, where what should be preserved is moving into territory where overthrow becomes not merely a possibility but may become a duty one day. We are not there yet but the almost inevitable failure of the next Government and world conditions may bring us close to the precipice ... pushed constantly in that direction by an irresponsible media!

Of course, this problem of the media as hysterical licence in the face of a weak State holding together a collapsing society is probably not fully resolvable in a free society and freedom must remain a core value in our society. But freedom always collapses when society collapses. Perhaps the chaos of social media will do the job for us. The benefits of a free and open media usually and generally outweigh the risks created by such a media and the benefits of freedom of speech, responsible protest and free political organisation are unarguable but we should be under no illusions about what is going on here. The mainstream media have become a socially corrosive and destructive element in society (far more than the claimed negative effects of social media) about which nothing can be done under the current regime just as, ultimately, a weak State can do little effective to deal with social corrosion - whether poverty, illegal migration, administrative incapacity, lack of resources, terrorism (when it is determined enough), organised crime or destructive protest. 

 

Why? Because certain liberal interest groups ensure that it will not even discuss appropriate and proportionate action in legislatures. (The appalling quality of our political class is another issue for another time). We are slipping into a vortex of social collapse as a result. The media represent an important trigger for that collapse because it self-censors any radical voice with the ability to deal with the issues head-on. New ideas are systematically silenced as inconvenient or uncomfortable. The media are no longer (to the extent that they ever did) acting as responsible reporters of fact and analysis but, instead, only as hungry creators of narratives designed to excite and trigger strong emotions in order to attract eyeballs. We are now all supposed to emote and judge complex political and international issues on the basis of individual 'stories' which appeal to our 'humanity' but apparently not to our reasoning capacity. As a result, we get fables, fairy stories at worst and the 'profession' (actually a 'trade') is filled with desperate narcissists looking at the main chance because their employment is precarious and their moral sense is constructed from the rules of their profession and nothing higher.

So, let journalists fight the struggles for other journalists' 'freedoms' but I suspect many of the rest of us may think there are other more important battles to fight. We might be inclined to fight their own solipsistic wars about Freedom of the Press more vigorously if only the media itself was a little morally correct and a lot more active in supporting the real heroes who are prepared to strip away the hypocrisies and lies of official systems (such as Assange) rather than dedicate their limited resources to promoting extreme actions by non-state small-scale actors and attractive figureheads like 'Greta'. 

 

The flow of journalists in and out of political offices also creates embedded conflicts of interest. There was the depressingly easy acceptance in the Thatcher era of 'honours' by Editors. There is the noticeable and shameful degree to which the BBC bends itself to the narrative of the political establishment. There is the flow of funds into 'campaigning' journalism that clearly meets the agenda of Western fixers in the international relations world. There is the back-scratching and back-biting involved in leaks and sources designed to break this or that political spine or promote the career of this or that rising manipulative psychopath. There is the aura of terror for individuals and corporations if some small blunder is exploded into a 'story' that wrecks careers out of all proportion to the 'crime' and disrupts any ability to solve a problem and move on. We often have visions here of the media with firebrands and pitchforks setting out to vanquish a monster as if we lived in a Universal horror movie.

 

And yet so much is swept under the carpet or not investigated because it is too complicated or inconvenient for the short term mentalities and butterfly minds of the media. There is the length of time it took to investigate child abuse in the care home sector, the lack of interest in the details of the crisis in the NHS rather than its results, the lack of interest in the weird and wonderful financial wheezes that pop out now and then to threaten the stability of the capitalist system on which we all currently depend to survive, the easy acceptance of any bit of propagandistic crud issued out of Kiev, the lack of investigation into the relationship between inflation and dumb foreign policy decisions and the utter disinterest in the structures and meaning of organised crime and its relationship to illegal migration until thousands start bobbing in little boats over the Channel in a perverse parody of Dunkirk.

 

As to the lost heroes, Julian Assange is now in danger of being sent to rot in an American jail after many years of vicious persecution yet he exposed serious wrong-doing in a way rarely done by a mainstream media protective of its symbiotic relationship with 'sources'. He is flawed but has not deserved this level of cruel and vengeful persecution. Instead of fighting for Assange (after all, he is not 'one of them'), the mainstream media ignore him as inconvenient. They prefer to worry not about getting more honest truths out of a dodgy system but 'maintaining their sources' and backing manipulative campaigners trying to provide us with yet more half truths to pile on the punter like Pelion on Ossa. It is a system of complicity in which a game of mutual manipulation has long since departed from both truth and social responsibility.

Journalism seems to have become a closed world of mutual back-scratchers, fundamentally irresponsible, as careful of its 'rights' as any factory shop steward but also incapable of understanding how its publicity can trigger dangerous extreme actions in the political process, encourage extreme illegalities and disruption and yet fail to support serious exposures of wrong-doing in the political and social structures into which it is embedded and on which it is as dependent as on a Class A drug. Contemporary journalism has long been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Something must be done ...