30 November 2020 — FAIR
Less than a week before voters across the US headed to the polls in the 2020 presidential election, famed journalist Glenn Greenwald made a stunning announcement: He was leaving the Intercept, the outlet he helped found in 2013, and striking off on his own at the newsletter website Substack.
27 November, 2020 — Middle East Monitor
![Israeli soldiers throw sound grenades at a group of people including journalists, near a gate leading to Hebron's main al-Shuhada street, closed by troops earlier in February, during an annual demonstration in memory of the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, in the divided West Bank city of Hebron, on 22 February 2019. [HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images]](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GettyImages-1126740088-1200x800.jpg)
Israeli soldiers throw sound grenades at a group of people including journalists, near a gate leading to Hebron’s main al-Shuhada street, closed by troops earlier in February, during an annual demonstration in memory of the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, in the divided West Bank city of Hebron, on 22 February 2019. [HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images]
Asa Winstanley AsaWinstanley
There is an old saying that you should not put the fox in charge of the hen house. It makes perfect sense, and yet that’s exactly what Western governments are increasingly starting to do when it comes to their freedom of speech policies. All bluster about “cancel culture” aside, the leading threat in the world today to freedom of speech is the ever-increasing crackdown on the right to speak out in support of the Palestinians.
25 November 2020 — TK News
20 November 2020 — Grayzone
23 November 2020 — Open Democracy
Exclusive: Secretive Cabinet Office ‘Clearing House’ for Freedom of Information requests also accused of “blacklisting” journalists; openDemocracy launching a legal bid for transparency
Peter Geoghegan Jenna Corderoy Lucas Amin
Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office “blacklisting” journalists “is a grave threat to our values and transparency in our democracy” | Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/PA Images
13 November 2020 — The Electronic Intifada
“an act of sick comedy to censor an event about censorship”
Facilitating the agendas of Israel lobby groups, videoconferencing platform Zoom once again censored events in the US and UK featuring the Palestinian resistance icon Leila Khaled.
11 November 2020 — Mint Press
by Raul Diego
The welding of American politics with social media may be the defining moment of a sea change that is taking place at the very top echelons of power in the United States and the world. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. elections, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all revealed their inescapable ties to the establishment when they launched an information warfare campaign against their own users and content creators in a bid to shape perceptions and control national discourse on the government’s behalf. Continue reading
30 October 2020 — Mint Press
Funded by a billionaire oligarch and increasingly seen as a mouthpiece for the neoliberal establishment, The Intercept suffered its biggest blow yet with the very public departure of Greenwald.
by Alan Macleod
26 October 2020 — Mint Press
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of the 2020 US elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.
By Raul Diego
26 October 2020 — Mint Press
Facebook content is already partially curated by government-linked think tanks, but for Samantha Power and others, that is simply not enough.
By Alan Macleod
Writing in the Washington Post, senior Obama-era official Samantha Power has called on social media giant Facebook to do more to crush what she calls conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating on its platform. Continue reading
26 October 2020 — Jonathan Cook
Facebook, Google and Twitter are not neutral platforms. They control the digital public square to aid the powerful – and can cancel any of us overnight
Middle East Eye – 26 October 2020
There is a growing unease that the decisions taken by social media corporations can have a harmful impact on our lives. These platforms, despite enjoying an effective monopoly over the virtual public square, have long avoided serious scrutiny or accountability.
24 October 2020 — Reporting by Matt Tiabbi
The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal. Continue reading
