In the aughts we had to hunt down page ten articles from foreign papers to find out the latest on the CIA torture program and the actions of Blackwater PMCs in the kill zone.

In 2014, Twitter had streaming journalists on the streets of Ferguson during the unrest.

In 2020 reddit protest watch subs (some made specifically for the purpose) were showing hourlies, dailies and incident videos from the George Floyd unrest and protests. Like Ferguson it mostly was law enforcement misbehaving and calling it law and order.

In 2022 the Iranian civil unrest went hot when the government doubled down after killing Mahsa Amini. Protestors went from defying hijab and tapping imam hats to throwing Molotov cocktails and burning down state buildings. Far right militants started nerve-gassing girls’ schools and the police engaged in mass executions. Then a deal was made. (Today 2023-10-16, a 16 year old teenage girl was put into a coma by the morality police. So stay tuned.)

A single platform is and never can be the global town square, partially because information about hot zones have to get through the fog of war and active measures to impede that content from getting to the public. Much like revolutionaries or resistance, information gets through when there are multiple avenues for traffic, enough that not all can be intercepted.

One billionaire (with some collaborators) spent $44 billion to neutralize one centralized information platform. Reddit and Google have also taken hits, but that isn’t all of the internet. If our shadowy plutocratic masters are able to douse all the surface web, I suspect it’ll be conspicuous and the public will want information, and access to the dark web may have to be transmitted.by word of mouth, but it will happen.

For all of us who are not conservatives, we’ve learned we can’t trust official sources nor rumors that sound too good (or too awful) to be true.