In the midst of people listing pretty much everything on the internet is bad, you can now add Pokemon Go to the list of what is being scapegoated.
Government and mainstream media have been trying to make the case that mass government censorship is not only legal, but also some sort of moral obligation. Mainstream media, for their part, can be shockingly direct at times with how much they hate free speech. What’s more, government have become increasingly creative with just how they intend on cracking down on freedom of expression as well. Whether it is age verification cracking down on, well, anything at this point, or “safety” bills aimed at giving government wide ranging new powers to control what is said online, mass internet censorship has become the goal for government with the mainstream media on the sideline cheering this on.
Social media has, for many years, been a convenient scapegoat in these efforts to censor the internet. Whether it is because of the conspiracy theory that social media, as a concept, is inherently harmful to mental health (despite the science saying otherwise) or spreading “woke” (good luck getting a conservative to explain that without sounding like a complete ass hole) and demanding platforms stop moderating their content, blaming social media for pretty much everything has become something of a favourite meme for politicians and mainstream media.
Thanks to politics becoming exceedingly militant these days, there are those who have taken things to extremes and calling for the arrest and imprisonment of those who own and/or operate these platforms. There convicted felon, Donald Trump, calling for the arrest of Mark Zuckerberg. Another one is a prominent Democrat calling for the arrest of Elon Musk. Brazil took things to the extreme by banning X/Twitter altogether. France went so far as to arrest Pavel Durov, the co-founder of Telegram (the nature of the arrest has yet to be really explained).
As I’ve said on many occasions, however, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, once the government has the censorship hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Australian government pushed to expand age verification laws to include video games. The Irish Health Minister went full nutso and demanded that government also go after Roblox for being a national security threat – a call that could very easily be mistaken for satire.
Today, we are learning that government has spun the giant wheel of internet things to blame and the wheel has landed on Pokemon Go. Indeed, there are accusations that Pokemon Go, of all things, is a national security. Since we seem to be on the trend of blaming the internet for everything, the reasoning could really be boiled down to “why the hell not?” at this point.
Now, credit where credit is due. This time, it wasn’t some random “western” politician or “western” mainstream media personality taking the bong hit and making those conclusions. In this case, it was the government of Belarus. From Politico:
A Belarus Defense Ministry official has accused the once wildly popular mobile game Pokémon Go of being an instrument of Western intelligence.
Alexander Ivanov, the ministry’s department head of ideological work, said the game was used to collect information about Belarusian aviation near Minsk, at its height of popularity nearly a decade ago.
“Where do you think there were the most Pokémon at that time?” Ivanov asked on the Belarusian talk show Essentially earlier this week. “On the territory of the 50th air base, where the runway is, where there is a lot of military aviation equipment. That’s where there were the most Pokémon. Is this not intelligence information?”
Yes, because if western intelligence wants to collect sensitive information, they don’t use military satellites, operatives working within the country, or insiders of any kind. No, the tool of choice is people randomly showing up outside the fence line taking great shots of the shrubbery outside or nice angles of a recent pothole that formed. That tree that is found on Google Earth? Yup, that grew a few inches. You know, because that’s just top notch intelligence gathering, right there.
What’s more, it’s so obvious that Pokemon Go is a western intelligence gathering tool. Why else would it be developed by a Japanese game company in the first place? That, after all, just makes perfect sense. What’s more, it’s only timely to issue these warnings over a game that was released roughly 8 years ago. Real quick on the draw, there. Practically overnight reaction, really.
At this point, we can just add that to the pile of other ridiculous accusations being made against online platforms and services. It’s stories like this that I made it a personal rule to never say, “Now I’ve heard everything.”
