Back in 2018, Chris Hedges appeared with the WSWS for a hypocritical show in opposition to censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaERQWrWLO0. At the same time, the WSWS gave open support for censorship in deeds by blocking participation for Democratic Power in the comments section of WSWS.org as well as in public, moderated meetings, such as the New York Education Workers’ Committee and others. Widespread opposition to the WSWS over #MeToo, BLM and the George Floyd protests, and the Covid-19 origin debate, as well as basic errors with regard to Marxist revolutionary theory proved too much for the Nanobureaucracy and they turned to the methods of Disqus.com, run by former Apple CEO John Skulley. After censorship follows slander and increasingly violent persecution. Bearing this in mind, we can read Chris Hedges’ denunciation of Youtube as so much hand-wringing:

“Are we a more informed and better society because of this wholesale censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative. And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power and obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information, as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political and social divides. 

“The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.”

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/29/digitally-disappeared-youtube-has-deleted-six-years-my-show

Democratic Power maintains that the battle has not been lost but barely begun. The resignation of Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, the scandals plaguing Facebook, and an uprising of Google workers combined with anti-trust legislation from the EU, all these factors show that the tech companies work and have always worked within certain non-Orwellian limits. These limits define their organizations as products of capitalist markets in communications. Besides creating social networking sites, the capitalist system also creates a proletariat which can seize these networks for their own aims. When the working class turns against capitalism, CEOs and other executives will lose their jobs and face prison time or worse, competition from other software will gain an advantage through standardization and democratic regulation by workers and ordinary consumers, and revolutionary propaganda will saturate the social networks so that a clear and permanent victory will take place in the consciousness of the working class majority. The next recession, likely to occur within a year, will force workers everywhere into struggle against the profit motive and against the capitalist state itself.