Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested by the morality police for having an improperly adjusted hijab. Witnesses say that she was beaten in the police van. Her relatives published pictures of her lying in a coma in intensive care. They wanted the world to know what had been done to her. She never woke from that coma.
Anything a social media company might do pales in comparison to the evil of beating a woman to death because she did not cover her hair in the approved way – but what Twitter did next is still worth noting.
Vahid Yücesoy reports,
I’ve just spoken to @AlinejadMasih. @Twitter chose to suspend her account because she shared the picture of #MahsaAmini, 22-year-old Iranian girl in coma after she was severely beaten by the hijab police and later died.
Alinejad Masih’s post was mass-reported by supporters and hirelings of the Iranian regime. The grounds for suspension of her account were that she had included an image of “graphic violence” in her tweet. The fact that it was a true image of Iranian government brutality that Mahsa Amini’s family wanted the world to see was ignored. This is how a system of pre-emptive censorship inevitably works.
(Via Jim Treacher.)
They pretended to think ‘The handmaid’s Tale’ was a possible future for America, but censor you for reporting evidence that the idea might not be so far-fetched in the country Biden longs to make a deal with.
Whether pushed down by transphobia or by islamophobia (or even by that ‘official’ feminism – dominant all my life – that was furiously denying that research could ever be objective when I was young, and now cringes to the denial of objective meaning in the word ‘woman’), it seems to me that women are always bottom of the intersectional hierarchy heap, allowed to join in screaming against the current hate object but otherwise expected to know their lowly place.
I’m tempted to think that a feminist movement that had ever been at all sincere in being for women would never have surrendered so instantly to the order to avoid the least hint of looking ‘Islamophobic’, let alone ‘Transphobic’. But I was born into a free speech country, and Samizdata has readers from the land of the 1st amendment, yet we’re not doing so well in preventing free speech from being ‘redefined’. Some women, indeed some feminists (some of whom I’ve quoted), are now pushing back against emptying the word ‘women’ of meaning. I think some should have seen vileness of political correctness earlier, but we surely have our own experience of the problems the ‘TERFs’ experience today. And horror in Iran would be easier to fight if we were not doing so poorly against similar at home
“Their website, their rules” versus “censorship” versus “ladder of intersectional victimhood”
It’s interesting to see how these things pan out.
Steven R (September 18, 2022 at 8:26 pm), I think it’s rather “their website, their arbitrariness”. Both when factual and when obviously fake, muslim youths who (allegedly) died at (allegedly) Israeli hands can be shown. Also I don’t recall the original George Floyd video being banned (admittedly, it was not in fact an image of graphic violence – but those who showed it claimed it was, and many who watched it bought the lie, including Twitter’s censors).
The time for talking, tweeting, posting, blogging, etc. is nearing an end. Not that these things won’t be useful but surviving will be a more crucial imperative. Keep your powder dry!
Or is talk all that’s valued here?
Greg, if someone commented here to say otherwise – that would still be just talk.
A week ago, Natalie and I managed to get a fellow Brit who had swallowed the narrative about Jan 6th (along with other wokeness) to recognise and admit (with some surprise) that he was wrong about something, that no, Jan 6th was not an insurrection – by pointing out that if it had been, those believers in the constitution, and especially in the 2nd amendment and its specific role in giving citizens power to resist government tyranny would have brought their guns.
We also pointed out that green loonies had invaded the House of Commons and glued themselves to the speaker’s chair just the week before – and no dodgy-looking actors had opened doors and removed barricades for them – so a group of demonstrators entering a legislative house, never mind a corridor leading to it, was no more unique to the US than it was unique to right-wingers in the US.
Talk has its place – and is all one can do on a website. The US constitution is, in that sense, talk – that recognises a place for more than talk.
It is not just Twitter – it is the entire Western establishment, crippled by lies and moral cowardice.
If Winston Churchill was alive today would “Central Office” expel him from the party? If people are expelled for what they say or write (about Islam and other matters) – then Winston Churchill would have been expelled tens-times-over.
How our society, the Western World in general, has declined.
Niall – the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled AGAINST Twitter – their policy of censorship is not “Freedom of Speech” (as they, absurdly, claimed) so the State of Florida (and any other democratically elected authority) has every right to, if they wish, insist that the “public platform” of Twitter (it calls itself a platform – NOT a publisher) not censor people who use the platform.
If this is upheld by the Supreme Court – then the 1st Amendment is not dead.
As you know – the plan of the elite is to say “it is not the government that is censoring you, it is the Corporations – in line with the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) agenda of the cultural part of Agenda 2030” – that must NOT be allowed to come to pass.
“It is not censorship and persecution if the corporations do it” is a despicable dodge – especially as it is well known that governments collude with the Corporations on censorship (including dismissing people from their jobs). And the vast Corporations are the creation of government – created by their advantages in tax law, and sustained by the endless funny money of the government Central Banks.
When Neville Chamberlain came back with ‘peace in our time’, Churchill criticized him for it, and some people in the Conservative party moved to have Churchill expelled from his seat, because they were so averse to war, and even sounding warlike. So the country hasn’t changed that much.
Nicholas – thank you for pointing to something that I either never knew or had forgotten.
Yes the human heart is like this – people think that by shooting the messenger they can hide from the truth of the message.
“We could be friends with these people, it only Mr X was not stirring up trouble” – by “stirring up trouble” people mean that “Mr X” is warning them of deadly peril – and they would rather stick their heads in the sand.