Orwell’s dystopia becomes reality as citizen ‘erased’  

The ghost of George Orwell must be weeping. The writing was on the wall when social media kowtowed to China, the EU and other despotic regimes in censoring what appeared on their platforms. But in recent months, moves by the global Marxist establishment to criminalise free expression have accelerated, as this article demonstrates. We are seeing “shoot the messenger-ism” at its most venal.
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg said on Buzzfeed two years ago about Facebook’s live video platform: “We can support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate; because it’s live, there is no way it can be curated.” Except that it has been, because profits have trumped integrity. Fast forward to 2019, and furious back-pedalling by Zuckerberg in his article (The Nation, April 1) in which the hypocritical, brown-nosing, greedy personal-data thief mentions the words “harmful content” nine times and positively gushes over his role in a new era of government regulation. For “raw and visceral” now read “sanitised and vapid”.
A casualty of this eruption of thought control is the activist/journalist Tommy Robinson whose campaigns to expose the official cover-up of UK’s Muslim child-rape gangs, corruption in the mainstream media and his defence of free speech, have rendered him an enemy of the state and earned him accusations of racism and neo-nazism – unfounded, as anyone who has bothered to reference his material will attest. For speaking the truth, he has been banned within a few short months from Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook (where he had one million followers), his account terminated at PayPal, and his best-selling book banned by Amazon. Swedish journalist Katerina Janouch was suspended from Facebook simply for mentioning his name. Most sinister of all, two British MPs, Tom Watson (Labour) and Damien Collins (Conservative), have written to Google’s CEO demanding removal of Robinson’s YouTube channel. YouTube has admitted that Robinson’s videos do not break its rules regarding promotion of violence or hatred, but nevertheless it has hidden them from its search engine, it no longer lists related videos, and it has banned likes, comments and view counts (previously 20 million) in order to render him all but invisible.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Robinson’s stance, one should be fearful of this burgeoning totalitarianism. Robinson expresses truths about UK problems that have been festering for decades – problems in which the authorities have been complicit and which they want to hide. For his trouble, he has become a “citizen erased”, one of many worldwide.
How far will this go? If letters by Pike, Wilcox, Haupt, HHB et al disappear from this column, fear the worst.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga