Before long the Global North governments are going to realize the fediverse exists, and they’re going to put pressure on it as they’ve done—and continue to do—on corporate social media platforms. They’re the self-appointed deciders of what is mis-, dis-, & malinformation.
100%
Over the course of the past few years in particular, we have seen voices critical of the Empire driven off of these platforms. In the George Floyd uprising, we saw the collaboration of Twitter and Reddit in stifling the Blue Leaks (which coincidentally documented how US intelligence and law enforcement surveils and responds to social media in the midst of an uprising) along with the ban of r/ChapoTrapHouse and coup of r/PresidentialRaceMemes on Reddit. We saw them shut down the “woke” stream on Twitch, which aggregated daily live coverage of the uprising from cities across the country and around the world.
At the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war, we saw the removal of several news sources critical of the NATO line, while the presence of misinformation and psyops on Reddit and Twitter reached new heights. Reddit banned r/GenZhou (a ML educational community) and “quarantined” r/GenZedong for adopting a line which opposed NATO.
Now, with Gaza war, we are seeing the same pattern. Activists and journalists speaking in defense of the palestinian liberation movement are being removed from these platforms. The disinformation is absolutely mindblowing, with blood libel and demands for genocide circulating out of control. It makes the delerious state of social media at the outset of the Ukraine war look absolutely tame by comparison.
With every domestic and geopolitical crisis being followed by a series of ideological purges, they are going to reach a point where they have extinguished all meaningful opposition on the Silicon Valley platforms. As they approach that point, they will have to start disrupting the independent platforms which have been set up as an alternative. Communities like ours, as well as hundreds of others scattered across the Fediverse and various alternative platforms like Matrix, Telegram, Signal, etc.
The tactics are going to change too. These Silicon Valley platforms are either publicly traded companies, or VC-backed firms with the objective of seeking an IPO. The state can threaten their ability to profit, and they will turn on anybody to protect those profits. These soulless firms would hand Anne Frank’s email and IP address straight to the Gestapo. There is no low which is too low when monopoly profits are on the line.
The motives of smaller, independent platforms are different, and often personal. A fedi admin may very well value their cozy lives and turn states evidence, or shut down under threat of legal/extralegal retaliation, but they very well might not. The politics of the network at large present unique dynamics as well, both in terms of narrative control and information collection. We might find that the state has no interest in playing whack-a-mole with tiny fedi instances and chooses instead to place an ultimatum upon the internet service providers where they are typically hosted. We might find instead that censorship mechanism are imposed by the telecoms which provide internet access to end users. It is not clear yet what tactics they will employ, but it is a certainty that they will take action eventually. Watch this space.
This is absolutely something on my mind as well and we know very well that censorship already happens across the world at the ISP level. I appreciate you bringing up these points.
This has me super curious. How does censorship happen at the ISP level? I would think there would be way too many of them to account for.
When I’m talking about ISPs, I’m primarily talking about commercial ISPs. Not the telecom monopolies which which run a cable to your apartment, but the firms which provide the means to host websites and make services available to others, from cloud computing (rent a machine) to colocation facilities (rent a locked cage to plug your machine in) to content delivery networks (provide caching / redundancy for maximum availability). The state can lean on any of these companies, especially if they have a legal basis to prosecute these ISPs for hosting “extremist/seditious/communist” content. I don’t think it really matters how much competition exists in the market. They will crush the ones which host radical communities and the rest will self-regulate. Or they will use lawfare to turn them into intelligence listening posts.
How does it happen? They will simply show up with a court order. It could be a subpoena for an image of the server’s hard drive. It can be an order to install a surveillance backdoor or monitoring equipment. It could be an order to cease and desist. If the company is non-cooperative, they could return with a warrant and pull the whole rack of servers, disrupting operations for potentially hundreds or thousands of other clients and ruining the firm. It’s very oldschool. This is what they used to do, and only have been relieved from doing thanks to the consolidation of large cooperative platforms. Just as the Silicon Valley platforms have no motive to fuck with the national security state, neither do the ISPs. They simply have too much to lose.
In cyberspace, we see communities being forced to relocate from the Silicon Valley platforms, but we will eventually see the independent community infrastructure being forced to physically relocate from jurisdictions within reach of the Empire.
At the last mile, the telecoms are also capable of implementing various forms of surveillance and censorship, but there are too many ways this can be circumvented. I don’t think this can ever really be sealed up. Encryption is such a fundamental requirement for the basic operation of the Internet that there is no way to prevent it from being used as a layer of stenography for proxy services.
I think I understand where you are coming from. Thank you for taking your time in explaining it to me. You can skip the next part as its more of a personal reflection on what you said.
I am kind of an old dog when it comes to the internet and so I forget that people do not think the way I do when it comes to it. For me imperial core nations and their allies are not places where you want to host content that they might want to censor. For that bit I can agree on. They control what is in their borders. For example the Pakistani YouTube BGP incident or the seizure by the US government of .com TLD registered domains. Its like how I know you are always suppose to use a handle and never give away personal info, but I come from an era of the internet where you distrusted things by default. That is old thinking and not the way it works now and has not for a while. Sorry for rambling a bit. I just wanted to ruminate on the past and contrast it to now. Your post gives me that so thanks again.