Warning!: This blog post contains blocked content.
All of the evidence that I am about to present to you may be purely coincidence and solely circumstantial.
Like a good Sherlock Holmes mystery I’ll let you put the pieces together.
It all began in 2014 with the post To Whom does (Censored) Give Power and Influence?
The post covered Mapping the Terrain: (Censored) Charter School Reform, and Corporate Sponsorship, a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Education Policy that revealed the relationships between (Censored) and federal charter school “reform” to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of elite individuals, organizations, and private corporations. The article document how (Censored) is a central and important node in a network promoting the rapid expansion of charter schools, a reform effort that amplifies the voices of an elite network of privately sponsored organizations and individuals, while potentially disenfranchising the voices of community members and educational professionals.
On March 19, 2014, I received a notice in writing from Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, the publisher of the article, stating that they had been made aware that the article was posted online and banned Cloaking Inequity from providing a link to a pdf of the article.
I thought this was just a coincidence at the time. But I think its notable that it is the only letter that I have EVER received from a publisher restriciting access to a pdf of a peer reviewed article on Cloaking Inequity. So if my mother or a friend or a school board member or a superintendent would like to read about (Censored), then they will have to penetrate the subscription paywall of Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
This is a of course a bigger issue in academia, predatory journals. It is a travesty that we write an article for a journal then we have to pay them to read it. We don’t need the publishers, we do 95% of the work anyways.
Fast forward to 2015.
Jameson Brewer and I started a new podcast called Truth For America about (Censored).
What I found troubling is that when I started sharing this new podcast on Facebook, I was incarcerated in Facebook jail for two weeks and banned from groups.
What is Facebook jail? It is when Facebook bans you from a particular activity. Typically you are banned as a result of posting an article when it has been reported or flagged as spam. What’s interesting is that this ban has begun to extend to other articles about (Censored).
In March, it was brought to my attention by Dr. Susana Maria Muñoz that a Washington Post article about the (Censored) layoffs had also been flagged by Facebook as “abusive.”
On Twitter, Facebook told me that it was a just a “bug”
Then, Youtube blocked our Truth For America podcast that same day.
A (Censored) supporter at the time chalked it up on Twitter to copyright claim on the REM music in our podcast. But it turns out we have ALWAYS had written permission directly from the band to use the song World Leader Pretend. We suspect some sort of complaint triggered the temporary take down of the Truth For America podcast.
REM’s manager personally contacted YouTube and the Truth For America series went back up.
Then, this week Diane Ravitch began to post the Truth For America series starting with the first episode. The hits on episode 1 doubled to about 1,000 across platforms. We were AGAIN slapped with a copyright claim from YouTube which temporarily took the Truth For America podcast down, even though we have ALWAYS had written permission directly from REM to use their song.
And then yesterday, Jameson Brewer posted a new Washington Post article in the Badass Teachers Facebook page about the 35% drop in (Censored) recruitment and was immediately sent to Facebook jail. Other people are starting to notice these coincidences on social media.
So do you think all of this circumstantial evidence of CENSORING is purely coincidence? Or cyber warfare?
Circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact—like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on (Censored) click here.
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Cloaking Inequity 
We’re not going to stop speaking truth to tyrants.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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And then there is the court case lost by the Author’s Guild to Google. Google gets to continue the practice of posting online some big chunks of book content online without the author’s permission. Not the same as censorship, but a blow to authors who hope to make a living from their work. https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/supreme-court-declines-review-fair-use-finding-decade-long-book-copying-case-google/
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You hit a vein. Keep going until you hit an artery.
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I’m with Andrea. Keep at it. Of all the voices we need to hear as often as possible, Dr Helig’s is near the top of my list.
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Right after Jameson’s post was removed from BATs, I posted the same article on BATs. It posted fine but the next time I went to post, I received a Facebook notification that my computer had malware and therefore I could not post. I was able to get rid of it but since then I have found three other people who received this same message just after posting the same TFA article from the Washington Post. Two of them still cannot post days later.
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Not surprised at all. I run a website on parental rights in education in Texas, with a focus on opting out. We posted about the Pearson spying and were hacked and taken down for several days. When the testing window opened this year we were again hacked and malware installed that led many virus detectors to block user access to our page. I run a dozen other websites. None of them have ever been hacked despite using the same platform. It only happens during key testing dates. There is cyber warfare, and it is disgusting.
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Reblogged this on christybez.
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Obviously, censorship sucks, particularly in a country that professes to have a commitment to free speech (even though I understand that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to private communication, blah, blah, blah, as I will be reminded after I finish writing this comment.
That said, it’s more than a little ironic to see Priscilla Sanstead weighing in on your being censored. Ms. Sanstead is a notorious Facebook censor and banner of dissent. Once upon a time, when I didn’t yet view BATs as fraught with ego-maniacs, reactionaries, etc., I participated in various FB BATs groups. And in short order, I was reading about people getting censored, censured, and banned by admins (which frequently meant one Priscilla Sandstead) for various crimes and misdemeanors, often of the “you violated holy church doctrine” sort.
As I began to change my views of BATs and post to that effect, guess what? I became persona non grata in various BATs FB groups and got myself banned, sometimes by – you guessed it! – Priscilla Sanstead.
None of this is to be construed as any lack of support for your critiques of TFA, etc. Simply juxtaposing the “bad guys” banning dissent and criticism with the “good guys” doing very much the same. If you don’t see the delicious irony, you’re just not trying.
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Oh, yes. All that ^^^ and more. Banned & Twitter-Blocked here, even though I participated like crazy in the early BAT actions, before the guanopsychotic stuff started.Sorry, Priscilla, too much pot-and-kettle for me to resist the shot that Michael beat me to.
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Thanks, @cd: always good to get backup.
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I guess SugarMountain is still upset about the $100million fiasco in NJ.
Or maybe NewHouse has been needled.
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