Instagram – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The U.S. Government https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/01/06/meta-censors-anti-imperialist-speech-in-obedience-to-us-government/ Thu, 06 Jan 2022 18:30:08 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=775419 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure in alignment with US government decrees. Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from US government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.

I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the US government said it’s not allowed.

Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”

This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the US government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy. A monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the US government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.

The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.

The US government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes, and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.

Every evil the US accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretence of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The US government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> Instagram Acts as Arm of US Govt, Bans Top Iranian Officials After IRGC ‘Terrorist’ Designation https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/20/instagram-acts-arm-us-govt-bans-top-iranian-officials-after-irgc-terrorist-designation/ Sat, 20 Apr 2019 19:43:39 +0000 https://new.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=85252 Top Iranian government officials were suspended from Facebook-owned Instagram just hours after Trump dubbed the IRGC a “terrorist” organization.

Ben NORTON

A curious decision by Instagram, which is owned by social media giant Facebook, has called into question its independence from the US government. The company has banned several top Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, from its photo-sharing platform.

This disappearance of foreign government officials by American tech corporations is the latest episode in a global information war.

On April 15, the administration of President Donald Trump designated Iran’s military wing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “terrorist” organization. Less than a day later, Instagram suspended the accounts of several Iranian officials, from military commanders to politicians with no ties to the IRGC.

Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani was among those banned. (Soleimani drew public attention in November for using his Instagram account to comically respond to Trump’s threat of sanctions with a Game of Thrones-style meme.) IRGC commander-in-chief Mohammad Ali Jafari also saw his Instagram account suspended, as did Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour.

Instagram additionally banned Iranian officials with no connection to the IRGC, including Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the former mayor of capital Tehran, who has not worked for the IRGC for nearly two decades. It even removed the page of Ezzatollah Zarghami, a former government minister and ex-director of Iran’s state media broadcaster; and the chief of Iran’s police, Kamal Hadianfar.

The news site Al-Monitor reported, “Accusations that Instagram is practicing double standards and advancing a political agenda gained further momentum when the ban targeted non-IRGC figures, among them Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric who lost the 2017 presidential race to Hassan Rouhani.”

IRGC Instagram accounts were popular among Iranians, particularly during the recent floods that saw several cities plunged into crisis. Al-Monitor noted, “Many Instagram users have praised the IRGC’s ongoing involvement in flood relief across Iran.”

A pro-government newspaper, Javan, responded to the suspensions by sarcastically dubbing the social media company “Insta-Trump,” Al-Monitor reported.

Instagram: “We work with the appropriate government authorities”

This wave of censorship bolsters journalist Yasha Levine‘s argument that US tech corporations act as “privatized instruments of American geopolitical power.”

Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, condemned the Instagram censorship, tweeting, “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you aren’t proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you FEAR what he might say.”

An Instagram spokesperson told the US government-funded Voice of America (VOA) that the bans were done to abide by “the constraints of U.S. sanctions laws.” The spokesperson added, “We work with the appropriate government authorities to ensure we meet our legal obligations, including those relating to the recent designation of the IRGC.”

Instagram did not however explain why it also suspended the accounts of Iranian officials who do not work with the IRGC.

This is not the first time American social media corporations have banned Iranians. In August, The Grayzone reported on Twitter’s suspension of an Iranian student journalist, Sayed Mousavi, who did not work for the government, and was censored as part of a larger coordinated crackdown by Twitter, Google (which owns YouTube), and Facebook (which owns Instagram).

“What worries me is that, I was just a student doing my bit of what I can do to journalism to counter just a little bit of the huge amount of disinformation being put about my country,” Mousavi told The Grayzone at the time.

He added, “It’s really a burden upon us, different anti-Zionist, different anti-imperialist groups, to make our voices heard. We need to diversify our platforms.”

Israel, Saudi media, MEK, US neocons gloat after Instagram suspensions

The Israeli government gloated after Instagram’s ban of the top Iranian officials. On its official Persian-language account, Israel cited a proverb that roughly translates to, “You reap what you sow,” adding #TerroristGuardCorps.

Numerous anti-Iran media outlets, including Saudi state propaganda and pro-Israel websites, also happily reported on the temporary suspension of the English-language Instagram account of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei on April 16. (Khamenei’s profile was restored after the short ban. The accounts of the IRGC commanders and other politicians remain suspended.)

Israel’s right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper drew an explicit connection between the censorship and Trump’s “terrorist” designation.

VOA, the US government outlet, boasted in a report, “With 800,000 followers, the Instagram page of the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force was among the most popular pages of Iranian officials on the photo-sharing website.”

The American front group for the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a US-backed violent cult that has spent decades trying to overthrow the Iranian government, also praised Instagram’s censorship.

For years, the MEK was listed as a US-designated terrorist organization, until the State Department of Secretary Hillary Clinton formally removed the label in 2012.

Today, the MEK operates freely on social media, running numerous accounts for several front groups. Al Jazeera revealed that the cult even oversees a massive troll farm in Albania.

Opposition outlet Iran International TV, which is funded by sources closely linked to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was among the sites that celebrated the banning of Khamenei’s senior adviser Ali Akbar Velayati.

 

The neoconservative anti-Iran lobby group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) was delighted to see the
suspensions as well.

Instagram’s censorship inspired a campaign by anti-Iran groups to pressure Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to ban more Iranian officials. Opposition figures have pushed the #TwitterBan4IRGC hashtag, and have particularly targeted Iran’s prominent foreign minister, Javad Zarif.

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