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Defriending Canada: Natural Disasters and Facebook’s Information Scrub
Australia experienced this in February 2021. Facebook had gotten nastily stroppy, wishing to dictate public policy to the Commonwealth government. To teach Canberra mandarins a lesson, it literally unfriended the entire country, scrubbing all news platforms of content and making any posted links through the platform inaccessible. It mattered not that the content involved the […]
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The Censors Down Under: The ACMA Gambit on Misinformation and Disinformation
In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.” The same figure has encouraged the […]
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Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after […]
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Free Press, Propaganda and Censorship
In war, truth is the first casualty. — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC) How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current […]
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When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. — George Orwell Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government. To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being […]
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Meta and Privacy: The Economy of Data Transgressions
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?) On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine […]
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China Denounces US TikTok Ban Threat as “xenophobic witch hunt,” Firmly Opposes Possible Forced Sale

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app […]