OPINION:
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.
Subscribe to have The Washington Times’ Higher Ground delivered to your inbox every Sunday.
In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.
In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.
SEE ALSO: Zuckerberg admits to Congress: COVID-19, Hunter Biden laptop suppression was wrong
Welcome to the age of technocensorship.
On paper — under the First Amendment, at least — we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official — or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube — may allow.
Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.
By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence, and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.
SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg exposes extent of Biden censorship campaign to control social media
The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers that be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Mr. Orwell intended “1984” as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.
This is how it starts.
First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”
Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.
By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.
Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
Whatever we tolerate now — whatever we turn a blind eye to — whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when any individual or group — prominent or not — is censored, silenced, and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.
Eventually, as Mr. Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
It’s happening already.
–
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.