This Is How The Internet Dies: Governments are Scrubbing the Web

The Internet Is Being Deleted. 

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We are witnessing a massive, systematic erasure of digital history. From war crime investigations to grassroots activism and historical archives, the "permanent" web is vanishing. 

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down the escalating censorship from Big Tech and governments that is burning our collective digital archive. Documentation of major historical events, war crimes, police violence, videos documenting things like ICE abductions, but also thousands of photos, websites, and archives that play a crucial role in documenting our cultural and political history are being systematically erased from the web. 

This sort of mass censorship is escalating, especially as governments and tech platforms seek to remove any content that challenges mainstream media or government approved narratives. 

In This Episode:

• The Deletion of Human Rights Data: How YouTube erased 700+ videos from human rights organizations overnight.

• The "Safety" Smokescreen: How laws like KOSA and the "child safety" narrative are being used to deputize platforms as government censors.

• The Fall of the Archive: Why Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive and what it means for the future of information.

• The Shadowban Economy: A look at how Meta and X (formerly Twitter) use algorithmic demotion to make dissent invisible.

• ICE & Surveillance: The removal of apps like ICEBlock and the crackdown on community-sourced safety data.

• The Global Free Speech Recession: Arrests for social media posts in the UK and internet shutdowns worldwide.