> 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.
The last sentence is what strikes me the most. Maybe he was being paranoid but if your own family is telling you they are not getting a notification then something is wrong.
"We don't..." I turn to look at the 50 people that don't while the billions of other FB users have no idea about it. This is why you have no power to stop it.
Don't shrug it off, shame and peer pressure those around you who continue to use it, like smoking or drunk driving. Network effects work in reverse too
Because Facebook has the power to help or harm reelection campaigns of politicians. Also, if they destroyed the monopolies and with it the market cap of companies like Facebook, the pension funds of many potential voters would look much more meeker.
I get far less attention on very serious political posts with my own writing and thinking than I do posting a funny picture on FB. And my FB contacts are pretty aligned with me politically, so it's not as if they're uninterested.
So is there a conspiracy here or has this guy’s blog just been flagged innocently. I had no idea shadow banning on these platforms existed, it’s extremely scary that they are shaping debate this way silently.
I have little evidence, but if someone asked me to risk my life on the existence of shadowbanning/post nerfing on facebook, yep I'd risk it.
They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.
The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed.
I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis.
I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.
> At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.
I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before.
edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally.
edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"
Sometimes-censorship of our basic communications in society (increasingly mediated by a small number of military-adjacent organizations like Microsoft and Amazon) is one of the biggest existential threats to a free society.
Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency.
This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year.
FB feed has been crapfest for very long time. It keeps showing me stuff that is easily 1-2 weeks old and I've seen it 10x in the feed. New stuff buried deep.
Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order.
Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before.
FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.
Yet you continue to use it. No reason for them to change. Anyway, I agree it's naive to think their replacement will be better if it's just another corporation behind it. The only real hope is a decentralized open source solution.
You can’t promote some posts algorithmically without demoting other posts (until they figure out how to bend spacetime). Putting some stuff at the top pushes other stuff down.
People don’t spend the whole day scrolling, and Facebook knows this. They know exactly how far down each and every person scrolls.
This means they know exactly how much other content they need to “promote” to totally and effectively censor content they don’t wish people to see.
Algorithmic “timelines” (which aren’t timelines at all) are nothing more than censorship: a remote organization deciding what you’re allowed to read.
(warning - joke ahead) I imagined that this conversation was a game of poker and everyone else was still anteing up and chatting / goofing off, and they all go silent as you push your entire pile of chips into the pot,
“I have little evidence, but I’m willing to risk my life.”
Confused players look at each other, “Uh, you mean about the Facebook thing? Why would you do that? We would have been fine just betting a dollar or whatever...”
Of course it isn't innocent. That doesn't even measure up to Occam's Razor, let alone some critical thought. There's political and intelligence participation clearly visible just beneath the surface every step of the way in this persecution. No reason to believe it stops here. I'll readily agree it's scary.
Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.
It's nearly impossible to mention intelligence interference in the media without getting downvoted unless you are on a conspiracy forum. The sad thing is that there is a ton of evidence for it. A couple big examples are Operation Mockingbird and the Palantir / HB Gary slide deck for taking out Wikileaks, but there are countless others.
Huh. I wasn't aware of the conspiracy theory association around the idea of intelligence interference in media. I was just mentioning what appears to be the simplest explanation, in the light of Snowden's intelligence revelations.
Just seems to me that mostly-secret media interference is a less complex problem to solve than the type of pervasive surveillance that requires installing extra rooms of equipment at numerous telecommunications nodes around the world. And we have confirmation that the latter has happened, at least.
Granted, you would expect to hear rumors eventually, as lots of people would have to be involved and still manage to both keep their mouths shut and hide the activity from everyone else.
How does "massive international deep state conspiracy to censor reporting on a trial" vs "innocently/negligently flagged due to x" not hold up to Occam's Razor?
Good question. Note, however, that before Snowden we have also been saying - look on those idiots posting about mass surveillance by NSA on their conspiracy maniacs forums. So good FB/Google/Twitter are removing all those crap.
A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs.
On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations.
Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority.
In this particular case there is no shortage of evidence that there is a massive international deep state conspiracy against Assange. Given that fact, the question is what measures this conspiracy is taking and not its existence.
If there was no such evidence, then concluding conspiracy based on what is happening with FB and Twitter would indeed be crazy.
Maybe I'm just cynical but there's not a shred of doubt in my mind these companies regularly engage in shadowbanning among many other nefarious activities. They're trying to make money and you are the product after all. They could care less about you or their impact to society.
The recent Twitter "hack" showed that the internal Twitter screens had options to ban users from Search or Trending. It's been widely complained about for years by people on the Right.
I follow several dozen very left wing / progressive accounts on twitter and haven't seen any of them on my timeline for weeks. Examples:
Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts.
I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.
There are numerous accounts of this happening on most media oriented platforms. From simply removing followers to flagging your account as unsafe so it does not appear as a recommendation or public listing anymore.
just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.
The real problem is the opacity of the algorithms. We can't generate evidences that they are censoring the debate. The lack of transparency is a menace for democracy.
This is the dawn of new era, where freedom of speech is gone, even though in theory you can stand on the corner of the street and shout to people about things.
This starts to be much worst than communistic censorship - in communistic Poland censorship office was obliged to mark places where the "offensive" content was removed. Facebook just erases that what is "offensive".
I hope that this will be the moment when people start to think if it is really so good that communication platforms keep censoring "improper content".
At first majority was happy that some of those they didn't like and didn't like their views were removed. Now people are learning a hard lesson - anyone views might suddenly become offensive and you will be done, gone, forgotten, fired (see what happen to J.K. Rowling or Bari Weiss).
sorry but how is this a new era? George Carlin caused a row with his Seven Dirty Words on national television because you couldn't swear. Everything that is mainstream is basically devoid of edgy or offensive content because advertisers want entertainment and nothing else.
When you wanted out of the mainstream commentary or scathing critiques you always had to go into subcultures, magazines, the arts, standup or whatever else.
This is what the guy is complaining about: Facebook and Twitter are still hosting his posts and tweets, but that some of his followers claim not to be getting notifications about every single one of those posts/tweets.
Facebook has auto-throttle: if you post too many times within a span, it stops sending notifications about every post to your followers unless they interact with one or more of your posts during that span. This is desired behavior, by 99% of people, because we don't want our newsfeed flooded by that one annoying friend with no life, unless we choose to follow up.
So no, the EFF and ACLU can't team up on this because there's no active censorship, or even passive censorship.
I don’t think freedom of speech is a left-right wing issue. There are people who strongly support free speech on both sides, and likewise there are censors on both sides.
It’s more of an authoritarian-libertarian axis issue.
I think in general terms as a political philosophy I would agree with you.
I think in terms of how restrictions on speech are implemented by Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it absolutely seems to be more used against right wing sources.
Craig Murray doesn't seem particularly right-wing to me. Meanwhile, here someone describes not seeing several dozen left-wing sources on Twitter for weeks:
"The left" doesn't like Clinton either. There's a big difference American liberals and leftists, and it doesn't make much sense to group them together. I'd say the vast majority of those on the left have a favorable view of Assange.
Assange is your typical cold war era anti war guy, it was sick how suddenly the American left wing spat on her for shitting on status quo. He was a messiah for the left when he did the same for Bush administration. Anyone remember Palins emails? At least for Clinton there was something to reveal.
Yeah, I think he is one of these activists that will call people out whatever side of the political spectrum and so spends his time oscillating between which side dislikes him most.
But you have to ask, did they censor right-wingers, or did they censor beliefs and behaviour that is often associated with "the right wing", e.g. racism?
I mean if the right-wing feels attacked because their posts get banned so much, maybe they should take a closer look at themselves.
Right, but for Americans everything that is not certified by democratic party is racist so there's not much to look into. No one really buys that argument unless you're extremely naive.
I don't think it's helpful to blame things on broad groupings of the political spectrum like "the left". But a discussion on how scary it is the social media platforms are shaping debate needs to acknowledge the existence of large, powerful movements demanding that they build the tools and precedent to do so.
The prosecuter's attempts to characterize a Federal Supermax prison as a humane experience are frustrating. They notably use solitary confinement very liberally. Solitary confinement for extended periods very clearly is torture, with severe, negative psychological effects
The Wikipedia excerpt on ADX Florence:
"As of September 2020, there are 356 prisoners. They are confined 23 hours per day in single cells with facilities made of poured concrete to deter self-harm, and 24-hour supervision, carried out intensively with high staff-inmate ratios. Phones are generally banned, and only limited broadcast entertainment is permitted. After three years in maximum confinement, some prisoners may be transferred to a less restrictive prison."
Supermax prisons are for prisoners that are violent or are capable of organizing violence: mass murderers, terrorists, high-sec prisoners (like cartel leaders), or those with a long streak of violent crimes against security guards or other inmates.
Generally, most Supermax prisoners are housed in solitary confinement because it is not safe for other prisoners to be near them because of their propensity to engage in acts of violence against their fellow inmates. (Note: in many state prisons, solitary is used for punishment; this is not allowed at the federal level.)
Other countries, i.e., in the EU, have high security prisons, and those high security prisons also use solitary confinement for high risk prisoners as needed. The federal supermax simply has more because we have a bigger population; on a per capita basis the imposition of solitary confinement is about equal.
It's not an "initial, mandatory stint" of 3 years. Most Supermax prisoners are housed for less than 3 years (in the Supermax facility), and in order to be subject to solitary on arrival you must be a high-risk prisoner (cartel or history of violence while incarcerated).
It is the exceptional case that a prisoner remains in Supermax, much less Supermax solitary, for more than a year. And quite honestly, all of those exceptional cases are there for a reason and have earned the punishment.
Go back up to my original post on ADX Florence. "After three years in maximum confinement, some prisoners may be transferred to a less restrictive prison."
And note that several espionage sentenced prisoners are there. None of them did anything violent.
Remember all the people, including HN commenters, who said he should just turn himself in and clear his name in court in Sweden. Only conspiracy theorists believed that powerful authorities were gunning for him behind the scenes.
It is entirely self-consistent to say both that he should’ve faced his accusers in Sweden and that the American charges look like an outrageous attempt to stifle legitime journalism.
I don’t see how it is self-consistent to say Sweden would’ve been more dangerous than the UK, when it is the conduct of the UK that led to condemnation by the UN and Amnesty International, and the UK is currently in the process of considering his extradition to the USA.
My own personal belief (which is merely at the level of “well I reckon“), is that he probably did the Sweden crimes, and also that the prosecution only even attempted because he was also a political thorn.
This belief is based partly on the surveys which show that an enormous number of women have been sexually assaulted and also that they don’t generally report this to the police, partly on his behaviour.
It is also partly based on the fact that — as is currently being demonstrated by the very extradition hearing currently occurring — the US is quite capable of extraditing him directly from the UK without going via Sweden.
I'm not sure where you came across this - but in Sweden it's a judge which rules on an extradition based on the extradition treaty between the US & Sweden.
There's precedent in the Swedish court system which has previously denied extradition on espionage charges.
> But Assange could be more afraid of a snatch-and-grab CIA operation. In 2002, Sweden collaborated with the United States in the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians seeking asylum. That example is often seen as indicative of what even left-wing Scandinavian governments will do when pressured by the United States in such cases.
I must have come across the same as OP somewhere. Where Sweden was more likely to completely skip the judicial process, so we wouldn't notice it as we are now in the U.K. It wouldn't have reached Swedish courts to even see if your source still holds up.
Which is a bigger risk for him? Being in sweden or the uk?
Is your opinion, with absoultely nothing at stake, somehow more accurate and superior to his, when he has everything to lose? I don't know the answer to which country is worse. But I'll grant him the right to make his best bet when, against his will, he is all in for having published evidence of war crimes.
I don't know Assange at all. I might not like him at all if I did know him personally, I couldn't say. What is clear is the job they've done on him to "other" him and stop people from sticking up for his rights, which are of course their own rights has been utterly superbly done. Everyone sticking up for our rights has to clear their throat about not being "An Assange supporter" to even make obvious, simple and uncontroversial points about the rule of law and equality before it.
The thing he was afraid of potentially happening to him in Sweden is in fact actually happening to him for real in the UK right now. It is a logical requirement for him to be more at risk in the UK than Sweden, unless you wish to deny that the events being reported on in this linked blog are real.
I completely agree our personal opinions should not define who we support or oppose in a court of law. Even if he had gone to Sweden, been convicted, been given the maximum sentence for those offences, served that entire sentence, and only then been released: that does not change how guilty he is or isn’t of the new accusations by America.
Likewise in reverse: even if he is completely innocent of every crime is accused of by America, and the American courts exonerate him and proclaim the prosecution to have been brought for purely political reasons, and end up prosecuting and convicting his persecutors instead of him, that does not mean he is incapable of being guilty of the crimes he was accused of by Sweden, and for which the statue of limitations has now expired.
I think you missed the point which probably means that I expressed it poorly.
He has to guess which country he will be more at risk in. He can't /know/ any more than you or I can know.
He has the right to make his best guess and potentially be wrong about it because he has everything at stake. If you or I or anyone else thinks he has made the wrong guess. Fine. But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
What has changed utterly is the formerly bogus claim that he need not worry because the US were not pursuing him. The people who claimed that, of which there were very, very many had nothing at stake and were completely, totally and utterly wrong. I haven't seen anyone acknowledge "Yeah I thought he was making excuses but it turns out he was right when he said the US were after him and I was wrong about that one thing at least."
Easy to say anything at all when there are no consequences to us. We should acknowledge it. Indeed from a different angle we should cherish it and protect it.
Hmm; you start off with a point I agree with completely, but then you seem to take further steps I don’t think are warranted.
Everything up to this sentence, we are on the same page:
> But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
I would say he has the capacity, not the right. The right stopped the moment his appeals against his extradition to Sweden ended.
I do totally agree that people think differently when their skin is on the line. That’s part of why I’m in the “well I recon” rather than “totes innocent” or “he’s a wrong’un” camp.
At the time, and now, it feels logically incoherent to argue that Sweden is less safe for Assange than a country which has literally just decided to extradite Assange. Doubly so if you want to claim that Assange did not commit the offence and America conspired to fake it, because of the latter was true America could easily have done so with other offences that would have him sent to the USA direct.
America not liking Assange was obvious even back then, but it felt (and still feels) irrelevant to the specific claims in Sweden.
He cooperated fully with the investigation remotely.
He maintains that he has long been informed of the existence of the secret US charges from credible sources.
What compels a person to sacrifice his life for the sake of an investigation where the prosecutor is not even able to bring charges?
He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
He claims to have fully cooperated, the Swedes disagree. That’s what this is all about, from their point of view.
> He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
That is for the police to decide, not him.
To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
Edit: also, again, Sweden isn’t threatening his life, America is (IMO, even if the government denies it) — and they’re doing that just fine without Swedish help.
If you read between the lines, it’s obvious that Sweden never had a serious case against him, looked for every excuse not to actually resolve it when they had ample opportunity, and then promptly abandoned it once it was no longer serving the ulterior motive.
No one is saying Assange must be beyond reproach, we are saying let’s be honest about what games the authorities are very clearly playing.
Let's not overlook the fact that he did present himself to the police for questioning in sweden. He was told he was free to go and free to leave the country.
The investigation was then re-opened by a politician subsequently after he released the Afghanistan war logs. iirc.
But if that doesn't bother you maybe the uncontested fact that his _one_ accuser literally wrote a scribe on how to get back at an ex-boyfriend by falsely accusing them of rape might just a little bit.
To say the case was thin is the most massive understatement. If you had published the secrets of the military industrial complex and intended to publish more should any heroes get them to you for publication do you think you'd be at all scared?
>To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
The total unwillingness of the swedes to make a skype call in the circumstances while being completely willing to drop the charges is something that bothers me.
>And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
At no point have you ever been able to "trust the police" This is why we have the rule of law and courts in liberal democracies. It isn't perfect but its vastly better than anything else the human race has devised. We should protect it and keep striving for its ideals. This is the big issue at the center of this story. Assange's rights and yours and mine to the rule of law and equality before really appear to be being infringed based on the power of upsetting the military industrial complex.
That should probably bother us all to some degree.
When I say “trust the police” I mean trust them to decide who to prosecute, not trust them to decide who to convict.
Obviously you need to have the rest of the rule of law going on for any hope of a good outcome.
Rule of law includes not skipping bail to avoid an extradition that was lawfully agreed to by a judge of the nation you’re currently in, and penalties if you try it.
It also means that people don’t get to decide how they are interviewed when they are suspected of a serious crime.
It was a UK judge which decided to do this, remember. Rule of law.
> his _one_ accuser
There were two accusers.
> That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Nope. Just one. You were lied to. The second woman refused to sign the statement that was presented to her by the police officer. She had been taken to the police officer by the first woman. The police officer was a friend of the first woman. The second woman _refused_ to sign.
If you didn't dig in to get the facts I can totally see how you would believe the constant misinformation that there were two accusers but there were not. One of the women made no accusation.
>Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Becuase this is the hook that is used to smear you as an "Asssange The Rapist Supporter" if you wish to protect your rights which are the same as his.
But going back to Police deciding who to prosecute. The police in sweden decided not to prosecute Assange and that he was free to leave the country. A politican decided something different later.
People /do/ get to decide to legimitately protect their human rights, even, perhaps especially, when they are being infringed through false accusation. Assange always said the US were after him. Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape. Now nobody believes the rape accusation and here he is being vindictively pursued just as he said.
It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
> Nope. Just one. You were lied to. The second woman refused to sign the statement that was presented to her by the police officer. She had been taken to the police officer by the first woman. The police officer was a friend of the first woman. The second woman _refused_ to sign.
Out of interest I have tried to google this. I found precisely zero results the back up your claim, even with multiple attempts at rephrasing the query.
I have also found no references to their names, much less their relationships with officers.
> It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
Literally why I started this sub-thread with “It is entirely self-consistent to say both that he should’ve faced his accusers in Sweden and that the American charges look like an outrageous attempt to stifle legitime journalism.”
> Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape.
Looked like that then, still looks like it now. Why? The name of the country America is trying to extradite him from — the same country he was in when he said he didn’t want to go to Sweden.
> Now nobody believes the rape accusation
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events. Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation," says Eva-Marie Persson, Deputy Director of Public Prosecution. — https://www.aklagare.se/en/news-and-press/press-releases/201...
> I mean trust them to decide who to prosecute, not trust them to decide who to convict.
> Rule of law includes not skipping bail
"prosecute" "convict" "skip" "bail" These are all terms which explicitly apply to people who have been charged with a crime. If you believe that he was charged with a crime in sweden, you are mistaken. Otherwise, you are not really discussing Assange here.
> And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy (albeit to a lesser degree). You still have to make choices and decide how to live, even when you live in one of the authoritarian regimes that form the majority of the history of human societies.
If it is for "the police" to decide, I think you will find that "the police" will continue to assassinate the character and then the body of anyone politically inconvenient.
> This belief is based partly on the surveys which show that an enormous number of women have been sexually assaulted and also that they don’t generally report this to the police, partly on his behaviour.
It is possible that the intent of the Swedish prosecutor was never to have Assange extradited to Sweden, but simple to contain Assange in UK until the US side was ready to start the process to have him sent to the US.
While that seems possible with regard to certain interested parties, I doubt the prosecutor world be important enough to be in on any actual conspiracy.
Also the complainant (who could, with lower implausibility than the prosecutor, be part of such a conspiracy) did attempt to resume the extradition to Sweden as soon as she heard about the USA beginning the process of trying to extradite him from the UK.
I was one of those people. Yes, he should have turned himself in to Sweden instead of sentencing himself to several years of confinement in the UK.
The conspiracy theories were about the US seeking to extradite Assange using the rape case as pretext. This was dismissed as lunacy because US authorities didn't need the rape case as pretext; they could have simply sought his extradition on the charges they are now seeking to extradite him for. If anything, the rape case would have made extradition more complicated because Sweden is less willingly to extradite to the US than the UK, the UK would have prioritized extradition to Sweden over extradition to the US.
Making a case is just the public show, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if instead they just wanted to make him disappear.
They know that he / wikileaks have got more material / dirt on the US though, and that if he were to disappear that material would be unlocked (dead man's switch).
So for now the illusion of due process is maintained.
The US doesn't need to make a case against him. They just need to make an accusation in most cases, and that's enough to extradite. What you're missing is, the US has the ability to declare him an enemy combatant, and stuff him in Guantanamo Bay. The US claims there is no right to due process there. The US Gov could lock him away forever with no trial and that's that.
As I understand it from the reports.
The case in Sweden was already cleared right from the start. There was no crime and this was clear very seen in the beginning.
The Sweden accusation was started, because Sweden can send prisoners to the US immediately. The US started this scheme after wikileaks exposed the warcrimes in Iraq.
The Uk kept the arrest on Assange, even after this all was cleared. And are still holding him against all laws.
I still think he should have turned himself in and cleared his name in court in Sweden (or accepted the penalty for his actions if he was found guilty). And after that, I don't think he should have fled bail in the UK.
However, I do not think he should be extradited to the US over helping someone who had already decided to leak to do so.
I admit I hadn't realised just how badly the USA wanted to make his life miserable, and the fact that he was clearly right about that has made some of his actions more understandable.
Reading through this, I couldn't help thinking of a line from Hogan's Heroes: "I will see to it that you receive a fair trial, after which you will be shot."
At this point I'm honestly thinking the EU should just stop negotiating with them and let them go. We don't want barbarians that torture political prisoners, let them be friends with Russia and China instead.
Sweden was complicit in trying to get Assange into custody and many other EU countries such as Germany have participated in the CIA's Extraordinary rendition program[0]. Don't think EU members are saints.
Oh, if you want to see kangaroo court, just wait until he’s extradited. He’s about to have one hell of a show trial in Virginia while they torture him to death.
I don't understand what is the purpose of this theater? Is there any doubt that UK will send Assange to the US? Why bother doing this kind of show, where it is not "legal" to say that US tortures people in their concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay (see Day 14) and judge together with prosecution try to get rid of witnesses.
The whole charade is to enable a future army of lobotomized bootlickers the confidence to proclaim, "he had his time in court", long after all the barely-reported injustices in the proceedings of this kangaroo court have been forgotten.
It would also serve as a warning against any possible future martyrs who might intend to rely on the law to protect them for doing the right thing by reporting on the ruling classes criminality.
This whole farce also cements the US spot as world police, when an Australian citizen can be disappeared for not following US law when not even in the US, and their UK lap-dog just cowers in the corner begging for more table scraps.
"Nothing to see here, move along citizen. Don't give me a reason to check your permanent record for wrongthink."
"Evan Whitton wrote that Australia and other British colonies (India, Canada, NZ, US) inherited a legal system, not a justice system. It is an adversarial system constructed by casuist lawyers. Europe (and Japan) has an inquisitorial system which seeks the truth first."
Mind you, I've heard claims that if you're getting too much "organic" reach on Facebook they'll de-prioritise you in order to make sure you buy adverts, in the context of completely apolitical small business promotion.
That's absolutely true. Whenever one of the daily posts on my Facebook page does well, I have to stop posting for a couple of days because the next posts are throttled to the point where they are invisible. Most people will have to go to my page specifically in order to see the post, because it will not show in their timeline organically. After a couple of days of not posting I will get a normal amount of views again.
In the article he mentions that his own family isn't even getting notifications about his posts. So he verified it. I don't know how you and I would go about verifying it, but I believe him FWIW.
> My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform.
I certainly hope anyone with that insight would contact him directly first rather than post it on hn for fake internet points so that the hundreds of Facebook and Twitter employees here don't see it instead to intervene first for their own benefit.
I had a quite successful blog and great organic traffic from Facebook. My blog was doing great monetising adverts, so I had some cash to reinvest. I bought some adverts on Facebook in hope to bring more awareness to my little blog and get more traffic. The moment I stopped buying ads my organic traffic was a small fraction of what it used to be. People were sharing the content organically, but it didn't have the same reach. I decided to never give Facebook more money after this and removed anything related to Facebook from my blog. That being said this has severely damaged its growth and I closed it a year or so later. I saw that blogs similar to mine grew quite big and I know they heavily spend on advertising. Part of me is thinking maybe I made a huge mistake and I should share my revenue with Facebook by means of buying ads, but I would always had this voice inside my head that I would be doing something unethical. I would understand if Facebook displayed information, for example: "Your post will not be shared to your friends, because linked website owner does not buy advertising". That would be fair, but they make people believe they genuinely can share things with friends, but instead it all goes in vain, in the name of greed.
Definitely understand the conflict. Im not sure which direction is best, all I know is that the internet feels a lot smaller now than it did 10 years ago.
So they're either censoring for political motive or censoring to levy a tax.
Kind of throws the facebook defence against the idea that they should have to pay actual news outlets into a pretty stark relief.
Facebook are just a horrific company that should be heavily regualted with a very heavy hand. We can loosen it some later when we're comfortable. Facebook are unelected - I tend toward libertarian but their power clearly must be curbed.
Just like how Facebook regularly take down Palestinian posts which mention resistance — no way it’s at the behest of the Israeli occupation, right? I mean these are unverified claims and conspiracies. The traffic, however regular, must have just fizzled away. The posts must have spontaneously disappeared.
The judge says that closing arguments are irrelevant, because the opening statements were thorough enough. Why are they even going through the charade of witnesses testimony, cross examination, etc. then?
> On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out they have still not addressed the new superseding indictment, and that the judge refused their request for an adjournment before witness hearings started, to give them time to do so.
> Edward Fitzgerald QC for the defence also pointed out that there had been numerous witnesses whose evidence had to be taken into account, and the written closing submissions had to be physically prepared with reference to the transcripts and other supporting evidence from the trial. Baraitser countered that the defence had given her 200 pages of opening argument and she did not see that much more could be needed.
And E) That the charges are not politically motivated.
If they they are (as everyone knows they are), then the UK-US extradition treaty is very clear that the extradition request has to be denied:[1]
> extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.
But in order to determine any of these issues, surely the testimony given over the past weeks is relevant. The judge has effectively said that it is irrelevant.
It's factual, informative, (apparently) cites the relevant treaty, and it is not flame-bait. The requirement that the extradition not be politically motivated is an important one that was omitted from the above list.
One could argue that the conclusion that the material the judge considered 'irrelevant' is material relevant to the above is a subjective opinion. Fortunately,
DiogenesKynikos linked the treaty so we can evaluate this for ourselves.
Well, the defence is trying to turn the process into a “make the hearing about literally everything” three-ring circus, and the prosecution’s countering with “there’s a case to answer and the USA meets the required judicial standards”.
On balance, don’t you think JA has had a fair opportunity - particularly given the sheer amount of court time and media attention he’s had over the last ten years?
> On balance, don’t you think JA has had a fair opportunity
Not even close. The US started a war of aggression and this process is inline with silencing critics. In my opinion the US cannot be a dependable partner anymore. Not for security, not for trade and especially not as a defender of democracy. Maybe it never really was, but the nature of open information exchange certainly makes that more transparent.
That killed hundreds of thousands of people and you think someone who supplied evidence of wrongdoing had too much media time?
Except that, on paper, the UK [and I think the wider EU] claim they will not extradite someone to a country which still retains the death penalty, or which uses torture. Since the US clearly fails both those tests, no-one should ever be extradited from the UK or the EU to the USA.
But as we all know, the US is special and doesn't have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
Extraditing someone to a country with the death penalty is barred in UK law, however it's no bar if "the Secretary of State gets adequate written assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out"...
Everyone knows the prosecution is politically motivated, which rules out extradition under the US-UK treaty. You know it, I know it, the judge knows it. Yet everyone also thinks the judge made up her mind (and probably wrote her ruling) before the proceedings began. Not even giving the defense time to prepare a closing statement just underlines this. This is the sort of trial you're used to hearing about in banana republics.
It's not entirely unreasonable for the judge to dismiss closing arguments: this is an administrative hearing, not a criminal case. There may well be sound case management reasons for doing so.
Mr Assange can appeal to the High Court if the judgement goes against him, and then further to the Supreme Court, and potentially the European Court of Human Rights. Any of those courts can block his extradition.
But the US system incorporates a political viewpoint deliberately as part of what it considers justice in the public interest.
We, the UK, don’t decline extraditions on that basis - the prosecution has to be manifestly unjust in the sense of no real case to answer, or the destination has to literally be a banana republic.
Supporters may hate this, but it’s not actually what’s at issue at this point in the legal process.
Yeah, obviously “he’s going down” but not because of bias - he’s simply not exceptional (or motivationally pure) enough to be above the system.
> We, the UK, don’t decline extraditions on that basis
The UK is required by the terms of the treaty to decline extradition on that basis. From the treaty,[1]
> extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.
There's no doubt about the political nature of the prosecution, so there's no doubt about what the outcome should be, unless there are extra-legal considerations at play in the decision. We're all watching the answer to the following question be played out in real time: "Will the UK extradite a person for politically motivated prosecution in the US, in flagrant violation of the UK-US extradition treaty?"
That's interesting. I wonder if "politically motivated" is typically understood to encompass "acted against the general nebulous interests of the prevailing political and state apparatus".
Is it really so clear cut? Suppose a KKK member had fled from the US to the UK and was trying to bring about the secession of the Confederacy from the Union to form a white supremacist state, and that part of his strategy was to selectively leak US state secrets. Should the UK refuse to extradite him because the extradition request is politically motivated?
My understanding is that this is precisely the sort of behavior that the customary "political crimes" exemption in extradition treaties is supposed to cover. Things like espionage, treason, separatism and other crimes against the state are inherently political. The UK-US extradition treaty also explicitly states that in the case of politically motivated prosecution, no extradition can occur.
Yes, they should not be extradited for leaking US State Secrets. They could be extradited for something else, which should be easy since they are a KKK member, but not for that act.
Moreover, Assange isn't even an American citizen, so that doesn't work either.
I don't believe the KKK is an illegal organisation, but if it is then membership of an illegal organisation seems like it would fall under "political crime". In any case, change the setup to another organisation that is not outlawed but nonetheless has similar ends. I just don't see how extradition can be withheld for leaking state secrets just because the overall aim was to damage the US political status quo.
Membership of an organization that commits crimes is criminal, not because it is political. And if you're a member of the KKK you've certainly been implicated in a crime in some way.
That being said, it is completely ridiculous to extradite an Australian for leaking US State secrets. It should just not be a thing, at all. So yes, leaking state secrets should not be an extraditeable offense. Treason? Maaaaybe.
I believe the alleged crime is espionage. Espionage seems typically to have had a political motive historically. Does that mean that all such espionage charges should lead to denied extradition requests?
> "Fitzgerald [barrister for the defence] stated that all major authorities agreed there were two types of political offence. The pure political offence and the relative political offence. A 'pure' political offence was defined as treason, espionage or sedition. A 'relative' political offence was an act which was normally criminal, like assault or vandalism, conducted with a political motive. Every one of the charges against Assange was a “pure” political offence. All but one were espionage charges, and the computer misuse charge had been compared by the prosecution to breach of the official secrets act to meet the dual criminality test. The overriding accusation that Assange was seeking to harm the political and military interests of the United States was in the very definition of a political offence in all the authorities."
They should just save everyone's time by dropping pretences and summarily dragging Julian into the square and shooting him in the back of the head.
That would be much more humane than dragging this farce out with endless legal purgatory before guaranteed solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
All for sharing proof of systematic illegal murder. It's sickening.
Sure, but no matter how much info we can push out, the MSM and other outlets will push massive amounts of contradictory info, false intel will get fabricated, and so that won't be effective to get Assange freed.
That being said, it's still worthwhile and will help build awareness of how this world really works, but it won't get Assange freed.
It would change the public awareness, at least. Force coverage. Start a dialog.
However, my prediction is that there will be no large-scale protest in US about this. All those who are currently LARPing "resistance" against police brutality will just ignore his case. Mark my words.
>However, my prediction is that there will be no large-scale protest in US about this. All those who are currently LARPing "resistance" against police brutality will just ignore his case. Mark my words.
Please explain how Assange is being treated more unfairly than Breonna Taylor or George Floyd?
Nobody cares. If he wanted sympathy from Americans, he should have kept himself out of the last US presidential election. Democrats are going to be hostile to him and Republicans won't care because he's outlived his usefulness to them.
He isn't a journalist, never has been, and it's frankly pathetic that people have decided to retcon the guy into being one. He's a political activist who beclowned himself by aligning with foreign intelligence and they've abandoned him because, again, he isn't useful anymore.
This is funny. People used to recommend calling/mailing your local Congress representative and try to get them to do something about their particular concern. Now that Congress is completely partisan and just follows the top down party line, people are recommending to do one of the least effective way for a single person to effect change, electing the President, where even a single person in a swing state has a minuscule chance of affecting the outcome.
Don't even know what to say about this. I'll probably vote third party but I'm not going to pretend it's going to have any effect whatsoever on what the eventual Democrat or Republican president would do about Assange.
I was not specifically talking about the PSL. But you could pick a president by sortition of eligible citizens and practically be guaranteed a better choice than Biden or Trump.
The report was that he offered to pardon him in exchange for saying "who" the emails were from. They already had the emails - that's what Stone and Assange were doing together
I like to watch this Juice Rap News episode from 2013 about the Australian election, by the end Julian appears from the Ecuadorian embassy and he does some singing (voice-over, but his expressions are priceless): https://youtu.be/QWU6tVxzO1I?t=209
It's very easy to forget the human behind the name in these cases.
The last sentence is what strikes me the most. Maybe he was being paranoid but if your own family is telling you they are not getting a notification then something is wrong.