The First Great Deplatforming of 2021
And you though 2021 would be any better....
I woke this morning to the news that Ron Paul has been banned from Facebook. While I hate Facebook’s guts and everyone involved in creating that cesspool of conformity and control, and I think them having one fewer person captive in their walled garden is a good thing, there are some extremely disturbing trends coalescing.
The ban was done on the grounds of “Violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service”, implying that Ron Paul did something wrong, which is a massive, steaming pile of bull. This is a man of the highest integrity that I have every seen, including people of rank in large religious institutions, being on the level of respect I give to my own father. He has consistently done what he has said he will do in the face of overwhelming corruption in DC, a Constitutional libertarian. Some of the people that have been kicked off mainstream platforms there might have been some hint of validity, but not here.
The “violation” is that he has the respect of many Trump supporters. And that is entirely unacceptable.
Trump is an outsider and must be crushed by any means necessary. All possible support must be systematically exterminated. No expense is to be spared in doing so. I’m honestly surprised that the establishment hasn’t orchestrated Trump’s assassinated yet.
Censorship by Deplatforming
This past week, within 48 hours, Parler was kicked out of both Google and Apple phone app stores (this constitutes control of 99.9% of the smart phone app market) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) terminated their hosting. For not silencing Trump supporters on demand. Oh, the language given is some boilerplate about violating the terms of service, but that is just cover.
This was done for the sole purpose to isolate and inflame Trump supporters. To make them feel powerless. To control and silence them. This is the exact opposite of protecting Democracy, it is trying to smother it to death, and it is the power establishment working out of Washington, D.C. that is trying to destroy Democracy. Because their own power is the only thing that matters to them.
If does Parler manages to secure a new hosting provider, that one is going to get yanked out from under them, and so on, until they build their own servers, rent or build data center space and manage it all themselves. Then the DNS and payment processors will get yanked. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Paid agitators going in and purposely doing illegal things (child porn, threats of violence, etc.). All this and more has already been done to other non-mainstream social media sites that gain attention (like Gab). And they will do it to you as well if you start to make a difference.
Continuing down this road, you end up with the ISP terminating service and the data center throwing them out. With spurious legal charges, up to and including SWATTING the system administrators and anyone else. Further down the road is Soviet- and Nazi-style show trials and summary executions. When it gets to this point, to paraphrase the immortal words of Democratic President John F. Kennedy, peaceful revolution has been made impossible, thus violent revolution is inevitable.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the peaceful. But I’m also not willing to be a slave in the process of being worked to death either.
A Way Forward
There is still a ways from here to summary executions, though, and things that can be done to keep communication channels open. The first and most important ideas are decentralization and build it yourself.
Parler can be taken down because the servers are all in one place, making it easily targeted with a high payoff on success. The same cannot be said of a hundreds or thousands of individual servers. Fediverse is your friend here, but it will only get you so far. We don’t have the tools yet to build Fediverse 2.0: a fully decentralized social network. Some of the tools exist, such as IPFS. Some do not. I think a store-and-forward messaging system is going to be needed, and for more than just social networks.
I’ve already started work on my own version for use to add comments to this blog because my IPFS PubSub experiments didn’t pan out. PubSub requires the sender, the receiver, and everyone in between to be online at the same time and in the same network.
If you don’t own the hardware, if you don’t own the software, someone can take it away from you by means other than stealing it from you at the point of a gun. A server is just a computer that is always on and runs server software, and you can build your own, low-powered server for not much. My network attached server started out costing less than $300 and was based on a budget PC. I built it myself using a 4U ATX rack-mount case, which you can order from places like newegg starting at around $100. Even this is not necessary, but it is probably a good idea if you are building a server.
When building a server, get the most RAM you can afford and a decent CPU. You can add additional hard drives in later to expand memory capacity as your wallet can handle. More difficult will be learning all the server software. I don’t recommend anything besides Linux-based distributions for this purpose, since with software like Microsoft Windows or Apple OS, you don’t own the software, you are just buying a lease, which can be yanked out from under you at any time. Additionally, an software that is not open source is likely to be riddles with call home and surveillance tools that can be turned against you.
But, But, Muh Private Company
I’m sure the first argument I’m going to get is, “but its a private company and they can do whatever they want”. No. Wrong. Consider this: a company puts a sign up on their storefront that reads: “No Service for Black People”. How long do you think it would be before the store owner got taken to court? How long before that storefront was burned down?
No, companies haven’t been able to do whatever they want for at least a century. Instead, the rule is that if you grease the right palms with enough cash, you can literally steal peoples’ homes with the power of the courts and never have to face justice from those same courts.
First, corporations like Facebook are not private companies. They are Public companies and are not the same as a company with private ownership. Stockholders are the owners. When Twitter banned President Trump, their stock price tanked to the tune of $4 BILLION. That is $4 billion of their stockholder’s value that Twitter flushed down the toilet. That is peoples’ pension funds. If the executives did this knowing that the stock would tank, that is a criminal violation. (Not that I expect the courts to actually do their job anymore…)
Second, corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, etc., should have been hit with anti-trust lawsuits long ago and broken into a million different pieces.
Third, these corporations are closely intertwined with government. That is why you see Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey being called before the Senate and giving assurances that they will work harder to do the bidding of those holding the actual levers of power in government. That is why millions of dollars are funneled to these companies from government coffers. You shouldn’t be able to eliminate Constitutional protections by hiring a guy down the street to do the violation for you.
I think that is enough ranting for me. I’ve got code to work on.