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Social media companies are going after all the fascist/alt-right
"alternative news" websites. The Unz Review was, in fact, a website that
blended racist and right-wing extremist conspiracy theories with stinging
leftist critiques of capitalism and imperialism.

But TUR's flaws should not make anyone think this is a step in the right
direction. Facebook is a reactionary cesspool that re-creates and
reproduces racism and violence through its administration. From the
Cambridge Analytica Scandal to Facebook's standing directive to collaborate
with the Israeli government to shut down Palestinian advocacy, to my own
personal experiences seeing reasonable criticisms of Israel banned (and
blatantly racist and Islamophobic commentary permitted), FB banning sites
like this is similar to when they all banned Alex Jones. *They are not
banning racist content. They are banning dissident content, some of which
is racist.* That is not a good thing. In addition to the extent left
websites and internet advocacy is already under attack by SV giants this is
simply a prelude to much more aggressive purging of social media networks
of dissent.

E-mail is ironically one of the most secure protocols left for dissent.
It's the only way we can continue to reach out to large numbers of people
without having to worry about corporate giants using their walled gardens
to stop dissent.

Re: Finkelstein, I asked him about it. He told me he does not post anything
at Unz Review. Unz simply copy-pastes his articles from other websites and
Finkelstein hasn't gone out of his way to complain about it. According to
the Unz Review masthead <https://www.unz.com/masthead/>there are basically
only two people who actually administer the website, namely Ron Unz himself
and Philip Giraldi (a former CIA officer who holds similar views to Unz).
Other than that, it looks like the people who participate in the website
(e.g. its comments section and so on) are simply vile unknowns with deeply
xenophobic views.

I can't confirm it but I suspect that if websites like TUR, Alex Jones,
etc. did not have an anti-imperialist bent and were simply standard
right-wing racist websites (like Breitbart, DailyWire, FrontPageMag etc)
they would not only not face opposition but would have a much wider network
of support (including financial support) to lobby social media networks to
prevent any censorship of their content in instances where they do face
backlash.

Amith R. Gupta


On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 6:18 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

> ********************  POSTING RULES & NOTES  ********************
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>
>  From now on, any link to Ron Unz's website will result in a message
> saying that it violates community standards.
>
> Unz's website is about a good example of the Red-Brown alliance that I
> can think of. Unz, a Jew, offers more openly neo-Nazi material than any
> other website I can think of, outside the openly neo-Nazi outlets like
> Stormfront.
>
> That doesn't seem to bother Norman Finkelstein, who is listed as a
> columnist and whose articles used to appear there. Maybe having received
> more than $50,000 from Unz over the years had something to do with that.
> In addition to Finkelstein, Mike Whitney, CJ Hopkins and Michael Hudson
> continue to allow their articles to be posted there.
>
> Ron Unz's commentary on the FB ban is here:
> https://www.unz.com/announcement/our-facebook-ban-the-fatal-0-2/
>
> Facebook's report on the UNZ.com and other "misinformation" websites is
> here:
> https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/April-2020-CIB-Report.pdf
>
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