independent news

MINNEAPOLIS – For much of the year, independent media has felt the sting of increased social media censorship, as the “revolving door” between U.S. intelligence agencies and social-media companies has manifested in a crackdown on news that challenges official government narratives. With many notable independent news websites having shut down since then as a result, those that remain afloat are being censored like never before, with social media traffic from Facebook and Twitter completely cut off in some cases.

“Fake news is bad, Zuckerberg acting as the world’s ultimate gatekeeper is bad, users deciding which news orgs are ‘trustworthy’ is bad, Facebook is bad.” (CD) — Progressive and independent journalists are raising grave concerns this week about Facebook’s plan to fashion itself as an arbiter of what news outlets should be deemed “trustworthy”—arguing that the social media […]

(TMU Op-ed) — After Donald Trump surprised even the most pessimistic of us by winning the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, the powers-that-be quickly sought to find a scapegoat to blame for their dismal failures. Supposedly, it wasn’t the corporate media’s fault, the DNC’s fault or the current neoliberal power structure’s fault for ramming down an unpopular candidate down our throat who was […]

There are lots of good strategies for beating both corporate and government Internet censors and snoops. These range from alternatives to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter — to direct subscriptions to authors and pubs — to setting up your own VPN. All are worth the effort.

Boiling Frogs Post: An Independent Site … Not a Duck Nest
The saying goes something like this: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. While the duck philosophy, if you chose to call it that, may apply to lots of things in life, it does not apply to everything. I am going to provide a specific context to narrow the scope of the philosophy’s application. The context: millions of political news, activism and blog sites.