Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: you know the thing.
In previous articles on this matter, I took for the sake of argument at face value the Palace’s claim that the sacred Lady Princess has cancer, which I don’t necessarily do, and which I might have been more explicit about.
I have no idea, frankly, whether to believe she actually has cancer, given the torrent of disinformation coming out of the Royal Family propaganda machine. I’d prefer to believe it’s true, for reasons I have elaborated on elsewhere (karma), but all we have definitively to work with is the official narrative at hand and an analysis of what interests it might serve.
To that end, obviously, the peasants — even the ones nominally not on the Royal plantation, whose forefathers literally shed blood and put it all on the line to fuck the king and his stupid Red Coat Praetorian Guard back to whence they came — shan’t be allowed to speculate freely.
Liberalism? Civil liberties? Human rights?
What name so, when there’s a pampered welfare queen’s delicate, royal, majestic sensibilities on the line?
Via The Telegraph, in an article succinctly titled — subtlety being a lost art — “Tech companies urged to act on Princess of Wales conspiracy theorists”:
“Tech companies are coming under pressure to take action on conspiracy theorists using their services to spread false information about the Princess of Wales.
The Princess’s withdrawal from public life in December prompted speculation and conspiracy theories on social media about her health and whereabouts.
Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said that social media can provide a ‘distorted lens on the world’ for some users and called on tech companies to clean up their act.
‘Social media companies need to be much more transparent, accountable and responsible in how they design the algorithms that promote disinformation, conspiracy theories, and nonsense over the facts,’ he told The Telegraph.
‘There are algorithms which advantage conspiracy theories, negative emotions and hate. They are part of the reason why we so frequently see conspiracy theories and why they’re becoming normalised.
‘The net effect of it is that it makes finding the truth almost impossible on social media.’
Mr Ahmed’s call comes amid increased public awareness of false information spreading online about the Princess of Wales.”
Consider how far we’ve fallen down the authoritarian rabbit hole when it’s taken for granted that legacy media, the Fifth Estate, the lauded check on state power, is the most vocal cheerleader of censorship of all institutions. We just assume that’s what they’re going to do in response to any opportunity that presents itself, because that’s their modus operandi.
Is it not enough that these people have more money than God, the fawning, endless admiration from hordes of lobotomized fools even outside of their own country, access to the best doctors and food and every other material good, and the unconditional propagandistic support of the legacy media — they also have to shut down the few open venues for quasi-free information exchange in the world?
The answer, of course, is “no,” it’s never enough. That’s why they are rightly called totalitarians; total information control, and every other form of control, is what they want. Anything short of that is unacceptable.
The Telegraph goes on to demand, by way of censorious Twitter Chief Karen, that we the peasants respect the Royal “request for privacy” — despite living fat off the government dole and sucking up all manner of cash and property and adoration from the public:
“Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, formerly Twitter, posted on the site that the Princess had delivered news of her diagnosis “with her signature grace”.
“Her request for privacy, to protect her children and allow her to move forward [without endless speculation) seems like a reasonable request to respect,” said Ms Yaccarino.
A spokesman for Meta, which owns both Facebook and WhatsApp, said the company works with 80 third-party fact checking organisations.
Posts rated as false by these organisations have their reach reduced so fewer users can see them, the spokesman added.”
The nerve!
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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