Narrative aside, Newscorp owns 100% of print media in Queensland and 70% Australia wide. Murdoch’s empire engages in anticompetitive practices destroying competition in Australia.
Newscorp’s power corrupts the political landscape as well, ousting multiple Australian Prime Ministers (Labor and Liberal), as recently heard by PM Kevin Rudd at the Enquiry Into Media Diversity.
https://youtu.be/Ap_LuSQ5NSc?t=953
Newscorp has created an atmosphere of fear in the political landscape and those who do not obey, are dismembered slowly but surely.
In my opinion, it’s an absolute crisis with media in Australia lulling people into uneducated and misinformed opinions, often pandering to fear whilst often exploiting minorities for headlines.
That is exactly what I called for. The US media ownership rules were designed to create a level playing field, and news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum currently fall afoul of the old standards.
At least in the US, Fox News says their programming is entertainment, not news, and isn’t meant to be factual.
They have to say that to bypass a bunch of legal standards, since they regularly run stories that are demonstrably false.
For instance, they blamed the Texas outages on wind turbines, when the energy shortfall was greater than the total wind production. During the Portland protests, they were caught photoshopping up photos of rioting that never happened. There are many, many more examples, to the point where when they lie, it’s not really newsworthy.
The OP paints censorship as an exclusively protective measure. They don't consider that the similarities to being the ministry of truth.
Meanwhile the fact checkers use technicalities of English to sway whatever they're checking. Someone did something but the statement said they took 4 steps instead of 3 before killing someone? Let's make that "mostly false" and just state with no actual evidence that due to the discrepancy of steps the "statement" is false. It's completely intellectually dishonest.
It's an entirely abusive and subversive system that has absolutely zero oversight. Nevermind twitter and Facebook use these groups as an appeal of authority when there is absolutely no authority to be found. They use the names and their authority to state "this is the truth, no questions allowed". Meanwhile they have been wrong and recently have been sued over it and lost. What this means is that none of them can be implicitly trusted to always be the truth or even factual. So why bother pushing them? They're great for pushing a narrative of reality you want to force. It coerces conversation both in topic and candor to follow exactly what the fact checker wants the reality to be despite not being an actual authority in anything.
How this isn't a bigger issue I'll never know. We'll be getting to the point where Google only lets you search approved topics and removes entries which could be "dangerous" based on some arbitrary 3rd party moral authority you never chose. You can't can't tweet information that hasn't been preverified on twitter or Facebook. It's only a matter of time before Google rolls out fact checking for their messaging app or spam filters which leverage the censorship. Then what happens to free speech?
Although if you look at the actual text on the UKUSA agreement document HW 80/2 [1], rather than the short synopsis from Wikipedia, it says very clearly that the UKUSA agreement covers only sharing of "foreign communications" where footnote 3 on page explicitly excludes communications of both the UK and the USA.
Optic Nerve was one of these things. Basically, GCHQ or NSA hacked Yahoo!, GCHQ used that to collect stills for every single webcam feed on the platform (this! was! back! when! Yahoo! was! still! relevant!), including a lot of intimate photos, so on. Lots of fun stuff there!
But that's a modern example. There are some pretty interesting ones. Here's a fun list of some celebrities that were the targets of a Five Eyes country and were spied on by multiple agencies as a result:
