I'm very disappointed by the lack of press for such a major extradition case!
The fact it impacts press freedom, judicial impartiality, and foreign interference in a UK court, I feels like a lot of this extends far beyond this case, and I feel that the public should be aware of this to some degree.
What can we do other than sharing links to try and get the word out?
> I'm very disappointed by the lack of press for such a major extradition case!
I completely agree with you here, which is why I'm so glad that the last few articles Murray did on this have been posted here and getting at least some attention.
> What can we do other than sharing links to try and get the word out?
Sharing the articles by Murray and others is, I think, the best way. Protesting is a: somewhat unhelpful, because that doesn't seem to get picked up by the media either, and also because the government will most likely object to large protests due to the covid situation.
However, as Murray noted in other articles, news of the entire trial seems to get you shadowbanned from social media:
> 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.[1]
As noted in the HN article on that blog post, this is because FB shadowbans articles if they get organic growth for too long until they buy FB ads. This isn't specific to Assange's hearing but simply a reality of blog owners.
That still means that these platforms structurally work against getting important/valuable information to where it needs to be heard.
I couldn't think of a better example of why these practices need to die a swift death, if societies the world around want to have any chance of preventing a total downfall of discourse.
I doubt this is actually true though - as if it were it would be a very, very clear case of anti-competitive behavior, and although FB has bought of the US government there would definitely be action from the EU.
This is very much true. The very purpose of Facebook is to promote the opinion it gets paid to promote by its customers. People always simplify target-tailored-content to "Targeted Advertising" and then dumb it down to "you like shoes? buy more shoes!" but FB has become far more intricate then that.
Its customers are mega-corporations, political parties, governments. If some content spreads too quickly it not only gets shadowbanned to slow its spread, it gets reported to the authorities. Many regimes worldwide have taken note how China and Saudi-Arabia are handling the emergence of social networks. They want the same features. Even western democracies churned in and want FB to do more about "fake news". Tell me, what is the remedy against those ailment? How exactly does a social network slow down what is known as a "troll farm"? And that is the nice case where disruptive enemy propaganda is just that and not some dysphemism for a grass root dissident pro-human-rights civil movement.
The highest paying customers are not paying for shoe-ads, or to talk to their friends or plan events, they pay for censorship, surveillance and control of popular opinion. You are not a customer, you are cattle. No go and consume your feed.
That's a possibility and a possible contributor but doesn't convincingly explain why his traffic decreased 85% (if it was throttled after a certain level of success, you would expect it to plateau)
It wouldn't plateau because you get throttled across the board over all your posts and significantly so. Your posts, old and new, simply don't get promoted into timelines anymore.
As a result, your traffic from FB will rapidly drop until you pay them off, that's just business if you want to spread on FB.
Maybe we need an adjusted Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a combination of an indifference to ethics and corrupted capitalistic incentives."
Supporting the independent media outlets covering the case is very helpful (eg Craig Murray). A lot of them are frequent victims of legal harrassment which gets expensive.
Put the word out to friends NOT to support the Guardian, which has become an Intelligence asset since Katherine Viner became editor and actively worked to frame the story on Assange.
The court has only let in around ten members of the press. Though I'm sure coverage would have been limited even without that restriction, the governments involved aren't hiding how much of a sham this trial is.
> I'm very disappointed by the lack of press for such a major extradition case!
This is a criminal case heard at a magistrates court, if I understand correctly, the media are not permitted to cover the trial, until the case is decided. Media breaking the restrictions are subject to contempt of court.
Let's not make it look like "more than a dozen" articles is even close to enough coverage. If this was an extradition hearing for somebody to be extradited to China or Russia for the same reasons, there would be hundreds of articles for each hearing session.
If you believe in the rule of law, there is substantial evidence that assange broke the laws of multiple countries, so you may just as easily be on the other side of this debate.
If you believe in the rule of law you would want the potential war crimes investigated long before you would imprison the journalist that exposed them.
The fact it impacts press freedom, judicial impartiality, and foreign interference in a UK court, I feels like a lot of this extends far beyond this case, and I feel that the public should be aware of this to some degree.
What can we do other than sharing links to try and get the word out?