"The Internet enables free speech, and that makes it very dangerous to countries that try to control public discourse".
Powerful governments have always had the capacity to control public discourse through censorship, official media, deception, agents provocateurs, and other means overt and covert.
Like the citizens of Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, I know what it is like to live in a country where the state controls public discourse, suppresses opposition and severely curtails freedom of expression.
But by the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court started to protect unpopular speakers more consistently, some critics worried that free speech in America was threatened less by government suppression than by editorial decisions made by the handful of private mass-media corporations like NBC and CBS that disproportionately controlled public discourse.
Stealing and publishing data allows actors to control public discourse, the company said, and that data can then be amplified across fake Facebook profiles.
It's completely understandable that family members don't want footage of a loved one's death to spread, but it's not clear that that's their decision to make.It's really not Twitter's decision either unless we want to grant tech giants the power to control public knowledge and discourse, a dangerous precedent indeed.
The move has been seen as an attempt by the junta to closely control all public discourse in the build up to the election.
It loosened control on public discourse and changed what could be said in print and on air.
In recent months China has arrested scores of dissidents, closed newspapers and fired outspoken editors in an accelerating effort to tighten control on public discourse.
He then wrote a genuinely brilliant (and quite hilarious) Op-Ed in the Guardian about the role elite institutions play in reinforcing their legitimacy and how they maintain control of public discourse.
Nahum Barnea, the main political columnist for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said that while the Channel 10 problem was about a failed business, it was part of the struggle for control of public discourse in Parliament.
