People, the problem with this article is that it denies something that is clearly true: Russia did meddle in our politics and election using fake accounts taking positions on both the right and the left. Trump is plainly a puppet of Putin, will being a leftist puppet of Putin actually be fighting Trump?

The Soviet Union is gone, and yet many on the left continue to display a strong allegiance to Russia and their government despite it being a brutal dictatorship that regularly murders journalists. Why?

If you actually want to fight for peace and justice, you will have to create a movement that ALWAYS does that instead of just saying whatever Putin wants you to.

Big Brother is coming — for your own protection!

The problem for all of us is that we have allowed these platforms to behave the way they are. They are privately owned for profit corporations - when have they EVER worried about free speech - they are not the government.
Another point to note is they are NOT banning only "Left Wing" media - they are banning any who oppose the corporate interests of the media.

"The censorship drive will not stop with the removal of Facebook accounts. PropOrNot, a shadowy organization whose 2016 blacklist, published by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, helped launch the censorship campaign, hailed Facebook’s purge of accounts. In so doing, it made clear that this was only the beginning."

The rotten nexus between Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and Amazon and the accelerating upward redistribution of wealth.

"All factions of the ruling class are terrified of the growth of opposition in the working class and the mounting interest in socialism. There is an increasing divergence between the demands of the working population for improvements in wages and working conditions and the policies of the ruling elite, which is accelerating the upward redistribution of wealth and carrying out a new military build-up."

So-called "social media" is nothing more than a "surveillance technique" used by the capitalist class in order to monitor, collect data and record that data on millions of unsuspecting persons. It is also a "debt trap" being used by unscrupulous financial interests such as banks and other financial parasites such as "internet service providers" who lure people into these traps by calling their products "data". The cost to consumers of this so-called data is higher in the U.S. than in any other country in the World and is increasing all the time! Many web sites have no escape or close buttons so that the site program will continue to "run" as one surfs other sites and will not stop running untill one turns off their device, therefore running up the debt the user will accrue for the "use" of the "data".

I do not want to do this but I have to stick up for the Common People! How about the Millions of People "censored" daily by sites under corporate ownership rights? Now, that is all this matter is about ,and, Guess What, Face book and Google, Twitter ... Have Corporate Rights Too and a greater share of it than anyone!

I warned Alex Jones and others, You do not have ownership rights, because you rent from the people. Your site is allowed on the Public Internet that the people paid for its entire Infrastructure. You are renters and as such , no such corporate right exists, comment boards are not material assets. If you invite the public to comment than you must accept all; because there are no limits to free speech or expression and you cannot be sued for anything posted by a third party -Fair Trade Act.

Now, people need to universally defend rights to free speech and expression or you will all lose it. Google and Facebook working with government has the power to control the Internet completely. Truthfully, it is too late.

The article and previous comments do a good job describing and analyzing the authoritarian, draconian censorship and information control imposed by the social-media monopoly/cartel.

On a lesser note, I find it ironic and mordantly amusing that these public-relations, marketing mavens chose to call the alleged High Crime that warrants a virtual death penalty “inauthentic behavior”.

Apparently the mandarins of the technobarbaric culture are either oblivious or indifferent to the Kafkaesque, Orwellian qualities of this ambiguous, anesthetic bit of geekspeak.

Oh where are all the millennials todays , defending corporate censorship on the grounds that it is not censorship but "freedom of choice"?

I am what the MSM would call a millennial (but I despise the term and refuse to use it to describe myself unless I have no choice) and I believe that the way yourh are portrayed as generalized corporate drones in the corporate media is complete nonsense. While there are those amongst the youth who buy into the “choice/different ways of being” within the capitalist system they are largely from the affluent upper middle class. Most of the youth have lost all hope for the future - precarious work has been a major factor in this. The big problem is the censorship online and, above all, in the schools. Academic integrity, if it ever did truly exist, is a thing of the past. Real thinking does not happen within the institutions of the capitalist regime, no matter what the age of the people in question. I can honestly say that my intellectual development has occurred only within the context of the SEP/WSWS and my own studies.

Remember everyone, share this article on your platforms.

The class war is in full swing. And major parts of the working class are clueless about it. It's their illiterate political understandings that is the problem.

It’s not the fault of the workers themselves - the fault lies with the capitalist regime.

Yes for sure. Put then, everyone does have access to the same information I do.

Finding that information is the trick. If people are relying on facebook’s newsfeed for their news... they’ll never find the WSWS unless they’re already actively following it. That’s why the struggle against censorship is so important.

In a paradoxical way all this ruling class authorized CENSORSHIP honors the TRUTH of the very ideas and opinions they want suppressed.
I just e-mailed document" proof "to the editor and the publisher of the Providence Journal that a SNAP benefit ambush is planned for senior citizens living in public housing in Rhode Island. The ridiculous excuse being that their rent already includes HEAT and ELECTRICITY .
Sitting on a story until after your favorite Democrats get re-elected is also a form of censorship . To be sure, Governor Gina Raimondo , " Wall St. Gina ", is no friend of working class people in Rhode Island . My sister in law, a skilled NA ,tells me about cruel cuts in Medicaid payments to her Rhode Island nursing home - so understaffed with difficult Alzheimer's patients
PROJO editor Alan Rosenberg thanked me for my forwarded SNAP document notification . He did say he has a reporter working on the story . I asked the reporter's name and " could I talk to him ? " .
This a BIG STORY for senior citizens not only in Rhode Island but in ALL the states - Red or Blue. YOU might read about in the Providence Journal or the New York Times soon after the midterm elections.
Still waiting to learn the name of the Providence Journal reporter assigned to the SNAP AMBUSH story. I sardonically suggested to the editor that the reporter need not be a gifted Bob Woodward of " Fear " and Watergate fame. The TRUTH stings !

This is a further proof that we are indeed facing an upsurge of class struggle worldwide. To put it differently why would Facebook purge all Left wing views if times that we are living were great for the majority of people. The growing internet censorship from my view is a deliberate attempt from the ruling class circles to silence all those who are deeply critical of the existing status quo, and Facebook and other social media networks are playing a pivotal role in this respect.

Another excellent article but with all the journalistic focus on hard facts little bit underestimates terrible impact those blatant acts have and will have on society as this assault surely escalates in near and far future. And hence role of socialists, grounded firmly in material reality, is critical, the only rational and feasible alternative to delusional dead end of hi-tech capitalism.

In around 2003 Zukerberg famously told a friend that he was amazed by the fact "those morons gave up all the intimate information to him to do anything with it for free, no questions asked" voluntarily, willingly opening themselves to psychological manipulation, promotion or intimidation via controlled social feedback, in other words shaping of their social bonds and emotions associated with them for political and commercial purposes by some greedy and politically expedient bastards.

In fact what Zukerberg said something like "I am a little robotic version of Edward Bernays, father of modern technological mass propaganda applied to shape American as well as global society of control". As God-he proclaimed "I want to change the world for better", better profit , better exploitation, better war.

And it was exactly why FB was funded by experts of psychological warfare from CIA and NSA as well as Wall Street MIC and media interests with approval of APA.

People still on FB must understand that what they think are their FB enabled social relations or even intimate bonds of family, friendship or dependence are in fact fake, inhuman in their nature, artificially moderated, negotiated by controlled political, social or commercial algorithms, and hence "humanly inauthentic" and cannot be trusted at all.

Such a goal was revealed subsequently in FB contracts for deadly mass social experiments paid by DoD and CIA, aiming at mass manipulation of people sensibilities ethics, aesthetics, politics, technics, even poetics as well as their techno-cultish beliefs, fascination with wealth and opulence, delusional worldview of enlightened progressive techno-elitarism as the only path to development of civilization, only hope to save us all from ourselves but most of all molding psychotic vision of society as tyrannically harmonious, and as peaceful as occupants of happy family crypt are.

Those horrific delusions of reality fed by capitalist disease of greed for money and infiuence being the only moral arbiter of their material and immaterial endeavors are being funded by global capitalist financial system and with our own hands built, to recreate new high-tech inhumane dystopia.

Such experiments as zoo of social mass media only proven those outrageous fables feasible.

Most of the new "social media mystic immaterial religion" based economy, too many people are hooked onto after material industries collapsed due to collapse of income and hence economic demand from 90% of population resulting with extreme inequality is promoting magical thinking and worshiping God-like hi-tech elitism, in unprecedented in development of human civilization ways and its global scale.

All that serves as propaganda of deed, as people are seemingly paid for creating nothing but social myths, divisions, fragmentation, manipulation of human race with no material reality behind it, at all, in fact aimed at denying material and social reality of 90% of population.

At this time hundreds of milions are engaging in activities that are detrimental to human society at large , not only destructive wars, but immaterial production as well as big part of material production that wastes people's lives, ingenuity, skills, efforts, and health and destroys environment creating nothing but useless garbage and lies proliferating psychotic delusions of ruling elite and its grandeur.

Too many people do not realize that being entangled in everyday life they are engaged not with what Marx would call labor beneficial to community but actually acts detrimental to it, as society is molded into by ruling elite for benefit of ruling class and what social media was exactly designed for, namely destruction of natural human and social bonds and now this newest wave of censorship is exactly aimed for it and hence must be condemned as well FB and other oligarchic digital outfits condemned and dismantled as tools of social destruction in current form, framework, scale and purpose as technology must serve all or it must be abandoned, and vital and creative forces of society redirected to serve broad human needs of self sustainability.

When corporatist news merges with the state in a concerted effort to suppress 'real' information, regardless of the platform-now including the democratic internet content, regardless of the point of view-it is called fascism, plain and simple. The state has merged with corporate media in an all out effort to suppress and control content. This is frightening, to say the least.

I believe it was Mussolini who said fascism was the marriage of the corporations and the state.

"There is an increasing divergence between the demands of the working population for improvements in wages and working conditions and the policies of the ruling elite, which is accelerating the upward redistribution of wealth and carrying out a new military build-up."

The ruling class is frightened that alternative websites are revealing too much "accurate" information about political corruption, and the genocide resulting from the unending wars in the Middle East and Africa. The more the public "knows" about issues which "really" directly affect their lives, and is not hidden by the glossy edited whitewashed mainstream media news the greater the possibility of mounting social instability.

The military/security/surveillance/corporate state does NOT want the internet to be used as an organizing tool which will incite public outrage causing political protests, strikes, or violence.

And the Democratic Party is especially fearful that alternative websites will reveal and convince the electorate that the political duopoly is equally corrupt and no matter whose in power US imperialism will continue.

To rewrite the classic Nazi-era resistance poem:

First they reduced search traffic, and I didn't complain because I thought it was a conspiracy theory.
Then they removed critics from FB, and I didn't complain because I only used FB for memes.
Then they removed entire websites from the Internet, and I didn't complain because I was apolitical.
Then I was disappeared, and no one will even know.

Thank you Andre,
for this important political lesson. This information about media censorship by and on behalf of the ruling capitalist class, by the same token also serves to motivate the working class designers and producers of such communications technology to find the ways and means of ensuring that the IT revolution continues to benefit the human population as a whole, not just the ruling class few.