In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.
He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.
In response, Meta restricted access to his account.
First of all I stand with Palestine here but I acknowledge the hardships that the Jewish people have faced.
That said, this conspiracy theories ,groups and prejudices that target Jewish people are going to have a field day with the likes of this. The whole control the media thing doesn’t have to be some backroom dealings when you can just point to this type of thing as an example.
What is actually happening is Jewish people are far better represented in the higher strata of global business and they have huge lobbies around the world. You’re just more likely to have people sympathetic to their plight in powerful positions.
- Setup a fediverse account anywhere that’s not meta, x, or bluesky
- Publish your content
- Freedom.
It doesn’t need to be mastodon, as a matter of fact, Mastodon is kind of a shitty place to publish long-form activity pub posts. Firefish, or WordPress with an activity pub plugin is absolutely perfect for this kind of thing.
There is a wave of censorship and McCarthyist witch hunting against Pro Palestinian voices happening in the West. It is profoundly disturbing and shows how hollow the West’s claims to championing personal liberty is.
This is the sort of thing that freedom of speech is supposed to protect, but that idea has become so completely destroyed by Western people that I don’t see any hope for people like that poor influencer.
He’ll have to make his own website, or move to PixelFed or something.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
No government censored him, capitalism did
At what point will you be considering big corps=government in the U.S.? We all know big oil has tremendous lobby, we all have evidence the military industry that works for profit more than anything else is responsible for most American wars in the last several decades. We all know what manchild is ruining everything he touches and shakes hands with government officials. We all know that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica manipulation machine.
Corporates and capitalism might not directly do legislation or have the executive power, but the U.S. government at least is a for-profit organization for a long while now, and evidently profits are not made with showing oppressed people suffering when you are gaining shitloads of money by selling weapons/investing in the oppressor.
If freedom of speech can’t protect you against corporate censorship then it’s meaningless.
Of course, can’t have people facing reality and risking them not consuming content on your awful platform now can we, must capture attention spans at all costs and reality just ain’t cutting it for them
