It's nearly impossible to mention intelligence interference in the media without getting downvoted unless you are on a conspiracy forum. The sad thing is that there is a ton of evidence for it. A couple big examples are Operation Mockingbird and the Palantir / HB Gary slide deck for taking out Wikileaks, but there are countless others.

Huh. I wasn't aware of the conspiracy theory association around the idea of intelligence interference in media. I was just mentioning what appears to be the simplest explanation, in the light of Snowden's intelligence revelations.

Just seems to me that mostly-secret media interference is a less complex problem to solve than the type of pervasive surveillance that requires installing extra rooms of equipment at numerous telecommunications nodes around the world. And we have confirmation that the latter has happened, at least.

Granted, you would expect to hear rumors eventually, as lots of people would have to be involved and still manage to both keep their mouths shut and hide the activity from everyone else.

How does "massive international deep state conspiracy to censor reporting on a trial" vs "innocently/negligently flagged due to x" not hold up to Occam's Razor?

Good question. Note, however, that before Snowden we have also been saying - look on those idiots posting about mass surveillance by NSA on their conspiracy maniacs forums. So good FB/Google/Twitter are removing all those crap.

This is a fair question.

A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs.

On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations.

Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority.

Occam's Razor.

These networks seem to have abandoned whatever sense of decency they had in the early years of the Georgetown set.

We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.

In this particular case there is no shortage of evidence that there is a massive international deep state conspiracy against Assange. Given that fact, the question is what measures this conspiracy is taking and not its existence.

If there was no such evidence, then concluding conspiracy based on what is happening with FB and Twitter would indeed be crazy.