
“Those who control story, control society.”
-Plato
Introduction
Since 2016, using the pretext of suppressing information, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have silenced conservatives.
It is now becoming clear that these social media platforms were following orders from government agencies.
Obama’s Embrace of Censorship
Former President Obama bemoaned the rise of “fake news” both before and after the 2016 election. Obama’s discussion of “fake news” always carried the implication that what is “fake” must be excised.
At a Stanford speech in April, Obama called for “solving the disinformation problem” with social media censorship of “hate speech” and said that content moderation “does not go far enough.”
Weaponizing Social Media
In July 2021, then White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked by a reporter how the White House was policing information.
In an interview with Joe Rogan in August, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook made a mistake when it banned the New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
The laptop contained graphic information on Hunter’s sex life, drug use and questionable business dealings with China and Ukraine. Zuckenberg confessed that the FBI had told him not to allow the story to gain traction. The FBI claimed the story was Russian disinformation.
It has also been discovered, thanks to a whistleblower in the Department of Justice, that Facebook has been spying of their users private messages and reporting “subversive” private messages to the FBI.
Google controls about 95 percent of online searches, giving them a unique ability to influence what users see when they attempt to learn about a subject.
During the 2020 election, Google altered its algorithm to ensure that negative stories about Trump were what people saw when doing a Trump search.
Political cartoonist Michael Ramirez has won two Pulitzer Prizes and his cartoons are published around the world.
Department of Homeland Security [DHS]
During the 2020 election, the DHS outsourced censorship assignments to private sector partners. The DHS deputized private sector partners to pressure social media to cancel objectionable posts that questioned the election.
After Biden’s victory, the DHS rewarded its private sector partners with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in federal grants.
Conclusion
The First Amendment has no qualfier excluding “misinformation.” The Founders of America understood that all opinions and viewpoints are in need of protection.
Benjamin Franklin warned 250 years ago, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”
Photo by Victoria Pickering
Visit “Act for America” http://www.actforamerica.org