Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40% from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook. That is a fall from 90% to 12%. In the February hearings Facebook and Twitter were, between them, sending me over 200,000 readers a day. Now they are between them sending me 3,000 readers a day. To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister - people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody's timeline. My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform.It was not just me: everyone reporting the Assange trial on social media suffered the same effect. Wikileaks, which has 5.6 million Twitter followers, were obtaining about the same number of Twitter "impressions" of their tweets (ie number who saw them) as I was. I spoke with several of the major US independent news sites and they all reported the same. I have written before about the great danger to internet freedom from the fact that a few massively dominant social media corporations - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - have become in effect the "gatekeepers" to internet traffic. In the Assange hearing and Hunter Biden cases we see perhaps the first overt use of that coordinated power to control public information worldwide.
"Twitter has been far and away the biggest offender, labeling, fact-checking, and removing Trump's tweets and the tweets from his campaign accounts 64 times since the president's election. Tweets about the president's concern over mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests have been given 'public interest notices.'"
After midnight on Sunday, Bolivian authorities allowed the results of the exit polls to be known. The Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) presidential candidate Luis Arce obtained 52.4 percent of the votes, the Citizen Community (CC) candidate Carlos Mesa got 31.5 percent, and the "We Believe Alliance" candidate Luis Fernando Camacho reached 14.1 percent of the votes.Former President Evo Morales has announced his intention to return to Bolivia:
Bolivia's president-elect Arce thanked the people for their support and for their peaceful participation in the electoral process. "We have recovered democracy and hope. We ratify our commitment to work with social organizations. We are going to build a national unity government."
The Bolivian Socialists' message was categorical and clear: "we call on the community to avoid provocations... let's end this nightmare we have been living for a year."
A few minutes before the official information was issued, former President Evo Morales, who remains a political asylee in Argentina, recalled that millions of Bolivians cast their vote peacefully and demanded that the coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez respect the results.
"Yesterday we denounced that the authorities suspended the presentation of the results of the exit poll companies. That was suspicious. Everything indicates that the MAS has won the elections and won a majority of seats in both chambers."
Speaking during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Monday, Morales said he would be glad to return to his home country.
"Sooner or later we are going to return to Bolivia, that is not in debate," Morales said, without giving any timeframe for his potential return.
"My great desire is to return to Bolivia and enter my region. It is a matter of time."
Comment: See also: US ignores Russia's offer to extend New START arms control treaty without conditions