As an anarchist counter-information platform, we seek to be a tool and resource for a wide range of collectives and individuals, with different ideas, practices and needs. At the same time, we also face police surveillance that targets any infrastructure associated with movements radically opposed to the social order. This reality forces us to limit the circle of people involved in managing the project. We have had careful reflections about this tension on a few occasions in recent years, and we do not believe it is one that we can avoid.
To help address this tension, we want to increase the transparency to our practices by continuously publishing a list of submissions that we decide not to publish, along with the reason for this choice. This practice, borrowed from some of the collectives in the Indymedia network, takes the form of a page you can find here, which to start off with contains a few examples from the past months to illustrate how it will work.
There are others who claim to offer a forum for a wide diversity of tendencies, aiming to gather as many groups as possible around a single platform in the name of consolidation. They commit themselves to not centralizing the ideological line, but then still refuse to publish relevant texts that pose a problem for the dominant ideology in the project, without being accountable to anyone about these choices. We are trying to take a different path: we want to spread a clear vision of revolutionary and anti-authoritarian struggles through the content published on our site, leaving room for debates that help us deepen our ideas and sharpen our practices, without pretending to be a platform for every protest initiative, and being transparent about the reasons why we sometimes refuse certain submissions.
Our submission guidelines remain the same, they can be found here.
We take this opportunity to point out that we do not generally publish texts in press release format, designed to meet the requirements of the mass media. We seek to create a space for stories and reflections intended primarily for people directly involved in struggles.
We also tend to refuse publications that have no connection to Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), other nearby regions, or active struggles on the continent that we believe are important to our context, such as Indigenous land defense struggle in so-called Canada.
In solidarity,
MTL Counter-info