The Private Citizen

Is the so-called TikTok law a tool to enable the US President to censor apps and websites at will? Yes and no. One thing is certain: This law isn't about TikTok; that's just a smokescreen.

Political scientist Brian Klaas looks into why we talk so much about politics, but never actually discuss any actual policy. My critique of his analysis is rather predictable.

Revisiting the idiotic decision to ban Donald Trump off Twitter and what it means for the future of democracy that private companies started to influence public discourse like that and got away with it.

I explain why this show went on an unplanned hiatus and once again vow to get back into the swing of things.

In my annual recap episode, I am looking back at the topics that I've covered this year and forward to the changes that 2024 will bring for the podcast.

The reporters from the Twitter Files project just won the Dao Prize for excellence in investigative journalism. Could there be a better time to dive back into these stories?

What do Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, John Cleese, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Dawkins and Walter Kirn have in common? They are all, despite holding very different political beliefs, very concerned about the future of political discourse in Western democracies.

EU bureaucrats maintain that the Digital Services Act is not a censorship regime, but is meant to save people from misinformation by deleting it from the internet or hiding it from view. Which, in fact, is the very definition of censorship. Welcome to the Cardassian Union.

It turns out, that the EU's push to completely abolish digital privacy might not actually be an altruistic move to save children from abuse. Several tech companies, including one headed by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, stand to profit substantially from the decision. Which is why they massively influenced it.

How following the exodus of Germany's worst YouTuber to TikTok opened a private hell of lolcows for me. To a point where I don't think I understand society as a whole anymore. What is this shit? And where is it all going to end?

The EU wants to establish universal client-side scanning for text messages and photos on citizen's phones. With other words: All cryptography would be useless and hence, nobody would have any privacy in the digital realm anymore.

Germany tried to make its laws against child pornography stricter and it backfired spectacularly. Now, lawyers and judges are desperately trying not to enforce these laws as the government scrambles to fix them.

I'm back in the saddle. Well, at least partially. An explanation of what happened and some new developments in the Modern Solution case from a few years ago.

The podcast returns with more coverage of The Twitter Files. On this episode, I am discussing how the US government used the FBI to exert censorship control over Twitter and many other tech companies to reinforce government narratives and silence critics.

Many people seem to think that the democratic system of government extends beyond how the state is run and into civil society. In this episode, I advance the theory that this has caused a lot of people to fall prey to propaganda and misunderstand how journalistic reporting and scientific enquiry should be done.

The Danes say they have proof that the Russians blew up Nord Stream. But the fact that they want to keep this proof secret makes me think it does not exist and the whole thing is another attempt to distract people from Seymour Hersh's original reporting.

Instead of working with him to uncover hidden government secrets about the US proxy war in Ukraine, The New York Times and Bellingcat sold out Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to the authorities. The kid's now facing a lifetime in prison.

When Substack launched what Musk interpreted as a Twitter competitor, the billionaire tried to force journalist Matt Taibbi to leave the publishing platform behind in favour of Twitter. When Taibbi declined, Musk declared The Twitter Files to be done and dusted.

During the pandemic, Twitter and other social networks censored dissidents and suppressed factually true stories to reinforce government propaganda and the interests of multi-billion-dollar companies with respect to SARS-CoV-2 and vaccines to combat it.

To cover up Seymour Hersh's report, the CIA planted a fake story about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage with the press. Chancellor Scholz might even have discussed this cover-up with President Biden in person.

Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, US President Biden authorised a plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, which the US military executed last summer under cover of the BALTOPS 22 exercise.

Horribly broken content moderation practices at LinkedIn make the Microsoft-owned social network actively hostile to scientific progress and press freedom, it seems.

Dr Anthony Fauci, for a long time the man in charge of the US response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, has now admitted that vaccines have failed to stop the spread of the disease and were never likely to.

Today is not the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. That is just one of the propaganda lies by people who are afraid to stand up for peace and fight against murder and injustice.

For years, corporate media has maintained that Donald Trump was under the influence of Russian agents and that the Russians helped him win the 2016 presidential election. All of these claims turned out to be unsubstantiated. How exactly did the media err on such a monumental scale?

Today, the podcast turns three years old and I tell the story of how I became a journalist and what I learned in the process.

Some observations on the possible future of society from a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates.

Everyone needs a password manager these days and many people were using LastPass. Unfortunately, LastPass made some pretty horrible mistakes that mean that these people should look for an alternative now. Here's why.

The Twitter Files show us how cynical the US government tried, and often succeed, to shape how we perceive reality. But they also show those of us that weren't buying the propaganda that they aren't slowly going insane.

The start of the new year sees some changes to the podcast. This episode provides an outlook of what is coming down the line.

Looking back at the third year of The Private Citizen and at the topics discussed and issues tackled in 2022.

Responding to listener feedback on episodes about journalism, Drachenlord, The Twitter Files, the Fediverse, free speech, artificial intelligence and beyond.

The Twitter Files show how the factually accurate Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. They also reveal the secret FBI operation targeting social media executives and high-level journalists that led to this suppression.

In a first episode about the Twitter Files disclosures, we look at how Twitter, at the behest of intelligence agencies, catalogued people's speech and selectively silenced some of them. And then lied about it.

In response to listener feedback, we're delving a bit deeper into the topic of machine learning and its impact on society and our political structures.

Since Twitter doom and gloom has some people moving to Mastodon, the Fediverse is being discussed even by mainstream media outlets. Is it finally going to take off? Let's discuss some of the problems we are facing here.

What happens at Twitter at the moment is only a story because Silicon Valley is finally waking up to the fact that Elon Musk is a horrible and pretty dumb person. And the only reason that Silicon Valley did not know this is because it spent years stupidly convincing itself of the exact opposite.

In a world were computer algorithms decide what is best for us, two groups of people will exist: those who program the algorithms and those who do what the algorithms tell them to do.

People don't want to save the planet, people are afraid to get inconvenienced and guilt-ridden about their childrens' future. They only care about themselves and it's going to destroy our social welfare societies. George Carlin called it thirty years ago.

Elon Musk, after a long saga of tweets and lawsuits, is about to finalise his deal to buy Twitter. What does that mean for the social network and also the general political landscape?

Science-fiction writer and critic Theodore Sturgeon not only invented the Vulcan salute and the Prime Directive for Star Trek, he also pioneered a very interesting approach to critical thinking centred around always asking the next question.

Responding to listener feedback on episodes about Drachenlord, electrical network frequency analysis, Stephanie Sterling vs. the Domina dev, Nord Stream, fear-based journalism and religion.

Fear is the strongest of all emotions, which means news articles based on fear get the most clicks. Which means out society is going to hell in a handbasket and the idiot journalists are to blame.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, bringing natural gas from Russia to Europe, via Germany. Was it the Russians? Did the Americans do it? Why? And what will happen now?

What happens when you're a game developer and you put stupid political statements in your patch notes? Stephanie Sterling makes a video about it and you get banned off Steam. Surely that's a good thing?

Can you tell when an audio recording was made, down to the second, just by the electrical background hum? What sounds like a science fiction fantasy is actually real.

Permabanned on almost all internet platforms, Rainer Winkler has been effectively silenced off the internet. He's also being investigated for disseminating illegal pornography. Will he give up now? And is his situation actually a free speech issue?

Catching up with some stories I've talked about in earlier episodes: Julian Assange, Drachenlord and the War in Ukraine.

The EU thinks that some lines of code, probably shoddily written, should take precedence over how the actual driver wants to control their vehicle on the road. It's an idiotic idea and it says a lot about the people passing these laws.

The media landscape is breeding a generation of citizens that is getting taught to respect the authority of the state above all. No matter what the current issue of the day is, the pandemic, the War in Ukraine or climate change, it all boils down to a very dangerous thing: a citizenry that can't, or won't, think independently.