In the Covid era is free speech now dead? Are we facing censorship and control that was predicted would happen?

 

Are we facing a new era of control?

Is free speech now over?

Fake news - like it or not has been a phenomena for years, we tolerate it it and either look at it or discard it out of hand. Maybe we take a more in-depth look at the attestations and then decide if the piece is right or wrong.

The Covid crisis has ushered in a seemingly new situation, one that seems to have been warned about by George Orwell. 

Free speech seems to be going out of fashion and by that I mean speech that does not coincide with what the mainstream media broadcasts. 

Agenda seems to be fashioned by the minority these days, the woke voice is loud for such a small representation of the population and indulged by left wing media outlets. So what happened to balance and challenge?

Why is the so-called scare science of the climate lobby rarely challenged or a call for science to back up their claims? I mean real science, not unchecked cod science.

A free society allows free speech, like it or not, if someone has an opinion they can say it or should be allowed to. Even if it is not what I want to hear, everyone should within reason be allowed to give an opinion and explain why.

We can't do that anymore, thanks to various lobby groups who shut down anything that they can't accept. A lot of these types were never said no to as children, they think everything is on a plate and their opinion matters, sorry but when you are barely out of schooling take note of those who have been on this planet a few decades longer than you.

Have your say, but listen to people who were young like you once. 

Even moderate channels like Yahoo have now (temporarily they say) suspended people commenting on posts, did we fight world wars to have our liberty lost in the ability to speak our minds? 

Perhaps with so many comments on Yahoo not agreeing with the stories and perhaps telling it how it really is, that the media as such realises it has lost control. People  thinking for themselves perhaps they consider as dangerous? 

David Icke may be a controversial figure to some, but he like others who have a following are now finding their social media accounts deleted. When in time people's content from the past is seen as them being proved right today, but is now lost because of 'policy' then we are in a state where people start to ring the conspiracy bell.

The way it is playing out is that we may be looking at a situation where citizens are having less say. Brexit was one such situation, with much scaremongering being done by the media that we although the sky would fallen and that sort of thing when we left the EU, when we did leave nothing changed. 

Over Brexit, hasbeen celebs and politicians urged us to think again,  vote again and the biggest insult 'we didn't know what we were voting for' trotted out n some sort of desperate effort to keep us in the EU, well, sorry but people did know what they voted for and in the last election reinforced that view in greater numbers.

It will be a sad day for everyone if our mechanisms for having a public opinion are dashed because it doesn't fit someone else's agenda.  

Fake news? People journalism is rewriting the rules of media and is often the 'real deal.'

Standing Rock North Dakota -

a situation that was noticeably under reported by the big 6 USA media outlets?

The recent US elections encountered a new dynamic, that of 'People journalism.' Its been rumbling away quietly  in the background for decades.

People journalism is often written off by the mainstream media and governments as 'conspiracy theory,' a term I dislike. I prefer to call it 'reality' because it often is. If we take for instance the UFO subject, it has been variously talked down, ridiculed and laughed at in a concerted effort to rubbish the subject and anyone who dares utter or publish a word on it.

In my book, that's suppression and those that indulge in that get it coming back to bit them.

In late 2016, there was a situation in North Dakota, USA, where a company wanted to take an oil pipeline over American Indian territory lands of the Lakota, part of the Sioux nation. As a result, many from other tribes assembled to show their disapproval to support the Lakota people.

These were unarmed men, women and children who also attracted support from non-Indian peoples. They were faced and in some cases attacked by militarised Police staff. Yet, this did not make the national media for some time. Why were the big 6 media companies in America rather 'slow' to report this story?

Yet when this reached the greater audience of the world via the Internet, it was the sort of story to which the term 'fake news' may have been applied.

In the run up to the US election around the last quarter of 2016, a number of 'stories' came out through the alternative news network, from outlets such as Next News Network, Infowars and other independents, along with ordinary people's journalistic output.

With stories on the alleged goings on of individuals in government being very hot news, these stories which had some origins in WikiLeaks disclosures, in my view helped some people decide on hope they would vote.

Some of these news stories were on subjects of a very serious nature, you only have to look at the internet to see what these were, to realise that it was the forcing of stories to the surface by this underground journalism, that prompted the mainstream to eventually issue these as news items, but by this time they were often 'olds' by then.

However, the fact that these stories were often ran with in mainstream media outlets outside of the US, meant that the US had to eventually issue something on the subjects, rather than look foolish when they did go big and people wonder why no one had reported them?

Of course I am against false information being reported as fact and stories being warped away from the truth, as we should all be. People journalism is now bigger than the big media companies and they can no longer really control it.