During Ferguson there were multiple live online sources of information. Reddit had a couple live threads, twitter had a couple active hashtags, there were multiple ustream and livestream broadcasts. There was lots of cussing, name calling, generally un-pc stuff broadcast. Live streamed video caught multiple people yelling un-pc things at people on both sides, tweets were flying with the same thing. Video feeds showed cops prepping, arresting, and cornering even un-antagonistic protestors. The feeds from the people trapped in the coffee shop that wanted to disperse were very interesting, and showed some tactics like the very scary cop van-snatch-and-grab.
This time, there were 2 sanitized twitter feeds. There was 1 reddit live thread, that totally was abandoned by day 2. There were only 2 live feeds that I found, and they did not show much after curfew. Youtube had the most un-PC live coverage, and it was by RT, and it disappeared around curfew too. All this while cnn and the tv crews swarmed on 1 block of the protest with no action. Cnn showed 1 grab-arrest from a humv, but not too many other arrests They did show that they had about 8 cop vans prepping from an helicopter shot, but none were filmed near the tv protests. The first night they said over 200 were arrested. I did not see any arrests on the livestreams, twitters, or even RT.
I tried to post this question on reddit, and it got deleted or blocked all 3 times. It sure looks like they are actively censoring info and live feeds on this subject. Even CNN coverage seemed pretty bandwidth limited. Did anyone else notice the lack of online info sources? or have trouble trying to view or livestream the event?
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BeerBaron ago
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has noticed this. I do believe the gov't and 'responding agencies' have developed a playbook to counter on-the ground 'freelance' coverage and have been slowly perfecting it with each act of 'domestic unrest' From the OWS protest through to Baltimore.
I noticed with the Boston lockdown, there was a lot of avenues of information available to digest- multiple night-long video streams, twitters, 2 different police radio streams, and countless forums. When Ferguson came around, there was a LOT less immediate reporting available, but still enough to where you could get an honest feel for what was going on during the protests and later the riots. With Baltimore, there was virtually none of that. I had managed to find 1 'stream' of the protests, which was only 3hrs and had been pre-recorded. I managed to find 4 'streams' for the riots, but they too were all pre-recorded and none more than a few hours long. With each event, it's as if little-by-little, TPTB fine-tune their information-gathering apparatus to prevent and circumvent 'undesirable' information getting out, to the point of brute-forcing. Remember that guy streaming from Ferguson who had his phone 'stolen' while streaming? Maybe that wasn't such a 'random act of looting' as it was 'intentional information control'.
What I find incredibly peculiar about the whole Baltimore kerfuffle: A large amount of high-school kids are corralled into one location, against their will, and prevented from going home by riot-ready police. I was always told they were this techno-crazy market that can't stop taking pictures of every binality around them. So why is there not a flood of pictures from this group of kids? Were they somehow prevented from utilizing their phones cameras? Not to say that specific technology was utilized, but perhaps something else was. As I said, I'm just dumbfounded by the lack of photos from this incident.
The whole thing, the protests and the riots, reek of on-the-ground manipulation and control of information.
arrggg ago
Yeah. What is scary is not too many are noticing this.
I think that was part of the test, get the national guard involved, and see how much information they can suppress. The CNN guy made a few comments about "there are so many people here we can't get a signal out", while degrading their video to make it look real. Actually acting like they don't have a fat sat transmitter on top of the cnn van...