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Written by Gavin O’Reilly exclusively for SouthFront
On Friday, in an egregious act of censorship, the ICANN – a supposedly impartial body responsible for the administration of the world wide web’s domain system – took down the domain name of the well-known website SouthFront, an outlet that has been the previous target of US sanctions and social media censorship owing to its coverage of subjects such as the origins of the wars in Syria and Ukraine; topics which rarely, if ever, are given satisfactory coverage by the mainstream media, with edited versions, beneficial only to corporate interests, presented to western audiences instead.
As a contributor to SouthFront myself since November 2021, I can attest first-hand that it is a platform that has afforded me an opportunity to write on subjects that no mainstream outlet in my own country, Ireland, would dare allow to be covered. Examples include the Fourth Industrial Revolution intended to be ushered in by the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative, the almost nine years of western-orchestrated provocations that preceded Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, and the ongoing protests against the 26 County State’s globalist handing of immigration, with the south of Ireland’s political establishment being fully aligned with the interests of Davos and the US-NATO hegemony.
A website I previously wrote for, the Canada-based American Herald Tribune, suffered a similar fate in November 2020, when, alleging that it was being directed by Iran as part of an influence campaign, the FBI seized the US-based server on which AHT was hosted. Though resurrected on a Canadian server a short while later, American Herald Tribune would once again be seized by the FBI in April 2021, despite its host server being outside US jurisdiction.
Two months later, the US government would go on to seize the website of the Iranian media network Press TV, with the Tehran-based outlet also having to relocate its domain name to a new server to continue operating.
Despite this, and the aforementioned seizures of SouthFront and American Herald Tribune, being blatant acts of cyber-warfare and media censorship, they came in for little to no criticism from the supposed ‘free’ media of the west, the same media that would likely be calling for the triggering of Article 5 had Russia openly seized the domain name of a western website critical of Moscow’s policies, such as Bellingcat.
Indeed, there was little to no criticism from the Western press last year when in the weeks following Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, RT and Sputnik News were banned across the European Union, ensuring that upwards of 448 million people were hindered in obtaining a balanced intake of media coverage of the conflict. What was left was a version of events carefully manipulated by the corporate media in order to present the Russian operation as ‘unprovoked’, leaving aside the key fact that the conflict had actually began in 2014, when the western-backed government installed by the Euromaidan coup, attacked the predominantly ethnic-Russian Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east of the country.
This deliberate omission of key facts by the mainstream media has allowed for a version of events to take hold where Vladmir Putin is some sort of cartoon character-type villain, a madman that must be stopped at any cost. This, in turn, is used as justification to even further censor media outlets that give a factual and balanced account of events related to the war in Ukraine, thus perpetuating the cycle of propaganda.
A devious method, and one that had it been used in reverse and Russian security services had openly seized the domain name of a western website critical of the Kremlin’s policies, such as the BBC or the aforementioned Bellingcat, would possibly lead to a worldwide military confrontation.