If you’ve paid attention to the unprecedented online censorship that Western governments and tech companies have been carrying out in recent years, you’ve noticed a pattern. Almost every time a notable account gets shut down or measures are put in place to sabotage the alternative media, these entities claim that they’re doing it for some sort of national security purpose. The first social media policies to filter out “fake news” were done in response to widespread establishment hysteria about Russian propaganda. This rationale of combating supposed foreign disinformation became a precedent for actions like the massive social media account purges of summer and fall 2018, wherein Facebook shut down the page of the anti-imperialist outlet Venezuela Analysis and deleted major anti-police pages.