The alternative media group, Unicorn Riot, found themselves on the receiving end of the iron fist of Facebook censorship this week. During the middle of the group’s live coverage of riot police clashing with protesters at a construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Facebook cut their feed and banned the Livestream link from being shared anywhere on its network.
You can read the rest @
http://www.activistpost.com/2016/09/riot-police-begin-mass-arrests-pipeline-protesters-facebook-immediately-blocks-livestream.html
You may recall that social media has been at the forefront of movements like the Arab Spring, the coup recovery in Turkey, and (of course) the endless attacks on Donald Trump.
Note well that the US in general, and corporations like Facebook in particular, appear to be promoting revolution and social change outside the US, but going out of their way to strangle them inside the US.
Expect to see much more of this in the future. The tech giants are taking over much of the mass surveillance role from government, possibly because there's a lot of money to be made in the data mine. Here's another example of what is happening:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/09/15/from-space-a-new-effort-to-crack-down-on-illegal-fishing-across-the-globe/
If you want to believe that Google will limit itself to "cracking down on illegal fishing", be my guest. Maybe they will for now, but infrastructure is being put in place which will make the surveillance system Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four look amateurish in comparison.
What then?
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