Preserving the Evidence

Corporate giants currently engage in censorship on a scale the world has never seen before.

Thanks to the recent #TrudeauMustGo Twitter campaign, we’ve learned the identities of numerous individuals who supported or participated in the Freedom Convoy (see my earlier post here). When these people describe themselves and their point-of-view in their own words, they humanize a grassroots movement the mainstream media either ignores or demonizes.

I’m recording and preserving some of these testimonials here on this blog because we live in a world in which they can disappear. A few years ago Twitter banned a democratically elected world leader - US president Donald Trump - from its platform. In doing so, it tampered with the historical record. It obliterated much of what Trump had said on Twitter, as well as the responses of third parties.

This was an enormous loss to scholars, historians, journalists, and everyone else. It’s now impossible to double-check whether certain tweets attributed to Trump are real, or whether they’re total fakes (a partial record is available by following links near the bottom of this webpage).

click image to download my report (PDF)

As I observed in a research paper last year, nothing prevents private corporations - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn - from making anyone disappear. Nothing prevents multiple companies from obliterating millions of individual accounts, in concert, in one fell swoop. Corporate giants currently engage in censorship on a scale the world has never seen before.

Any material posted on corporate platforms must therefore be considered ephemeral. It could be here today and gone tomorrow. Over the next few days, therefore, I’ll be posting more screen captures of tweets by people publicly proclaiming their association with and sympathy for the history-making trucker protest. In my view, these testimonials are a pleasure to read.

Here’s one from a francophone gent:

Here’s another from a mom:

And three more. From a trucker, a nurse, and a soldier:

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