The mainstream reporting was so bad I just started looking on Twitter. I found both pro- and anti-"protest" accounts with video. Even the pro-protest account videos debunk the narrative that these are peaceful African-American protestors. Whenever one lets the mask slip or shows her hands or hair, it's a young white person. These are night time riots, plain and simple. Surveillance footage released by law enforcement shows that Mike Reinoehl loaded and cocked his weapon lying in wait before he murdered Aaron Danielson. Even the people generally sympathetic to the antiprotest viewpoint are able to publish their narratives using videos
from the pro-"protest" side! Even the Kenosha story, the one we cant tell on Facebook, is largely misreported.[1]
At this point, these Antifa people (who "don't exist," yet all show up at the same time and place in a uniform and are even aware enough to know who is and isn't allowed to film), the mainstream reporting, the Democrats and Leftist activists seem to want me to believe their words over my lying eyes. I don't anymore. The illusion is shattered.
I'm a bit embarrassed that people who profess to be hackers in our industry are actively allowing themselves to be cannibalized by a narrative that is controlled by those with power over information. Ever since I was a kid, wresting access to information from a powerful, ruthless elite is what motivated me to be a programmer and hacker. I couldn't put it into those terms, but it's the same sentiment from my first exposure at age 12. When a billionaire self-described hacker uses his authority as the creator of the largest online social network on earth to censor any evidence that goes against a certain narrative, even to the point of blacklisting, he has ceased to be a hacker, as have any employees who continue to be accomplices in this increasingly absurd information warfare operation.
I have no doubt that many of these people believe they are doing the right thing, but they themselves have been cracked and don't even know it or are too fragile to resist. Anytime anyone says "you can't say and you can't look at the evidence we don't endorse," I'm suspicious. Yet that is what we see right now.
The largest social networking site in the world will ban posts and even accounts for saying a certain narrative. The largest video platform in the world boosts the "reliable sources" mentioned in the article, and only puts less curated information after it. And the bird application uses trumped up bans, shadowbans and selective enforcement of policies.
When did hacker culture sell its soul?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ro8hkfBDVw