Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally admitted what we've known all along: Facebook was conspiring with governments to censor individuals who express opinions he “disapproves” of about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zuckerberg's admission comes after a series of court rulings that have turned a blind eye to government techno-fascism.
In Children's Health Defense v. Mehta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children's Health Defense against the Mehta platform for restricting CHD's Facebook posts, fundraising efforts, and advertising following Mehta's interactions with federal officials.
In a unanimous decision in the consolidated cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether states can enact laws banning censorship by large tech companies on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
And in its 6-3 decision in Marcy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to a federal effort to force social media companies to censor users' First Amendment expression.
Welcome to the age of techno-censorship.
On paper, at least under the First Amendment, we technically have freedom of speech.
But in reality, we are only as free to speak as government officials or companies like Facebook, Google and YouTube allow us to.
To take just one example, internal documents released by the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: the government has been working with social media companies to censor speech.
“Censorship” refers to a concerted government effort to stifle, silence, and completely eradicate any speech that contradicts the government's own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most ruthless and oppressive extreme.
The revelation that Facebook was working with the Biden administration to censor COVID-19-related content, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, came shortly after a federal court in Louisiana ruled that executive branch employees could not communicate with social media companies about controversial content in online forums.
Judge Terry Doughty likened government pressure on social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines and the election to an “almost dystopian scenario,” warning that “the United States government appears to be taking on a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'”
This is the very definition of technofascism.
Technofascism, clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, is driven by tech giants (both corporations and governments) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
Governments are not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns; they are laying the foundations to protect us from “dangerous” ideas that might encourage us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the stranglehold of the power elites on our lives.
So far, the tech giants have been able to get around the First Amendment by citing their non-governmental status, but since they act at the behest of the government, that distinction is dubious at best.
Philip Hamburger and Jeanine Younes wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits government 'abridgements of free speech,' and Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that the government cannot circumvent that amendment through private corporations.”
Nothing good comes from allowing the government to ignore the Constitution.
The steady and widespread expansion of censorship imposed upon us by big tech companies, backed by the establishment, threatens to lead to a restructuring of reality à la Orwell's 1984, in which a Ministry of Truth controls speech to ensure that facts conform to the version of reality supported by government propagandists.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning, but it has been used as a dystopian instruction manual for the social engineering of obedient, compliant and submissive masses to Big Brother.
In a world that is increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that define the boundaries of our freedom.
Once artificial intelligence is fully integrated into government bureaucracies, we will have little recourse and will all be subject to the heavy-handed judgment of our techno-overlords.
This is just the beginning.
First, censors went after so-called extremists spewing so-called “hate speech.”
They then attacked so-called extremists spewing so-called “disinformation” about a stolen election, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.
By the time so-called extremists were targeted for spreading so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, censors had developed systems and strategies to silence non-conformists.
Ultimately, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism,” all of “we the people” may be deemed guilty of some form of thought crime.
Whatever we tolerate now, whatever we turn a blind eye to, whatever we justify when it is imposed on others, whether it is done in the name of ensuring racial justice, defending democracy, or fighting fascism, it will eventually come back to incarcerate us all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when individuals or groups, famous or not, are censored, silenced, and removed from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram for expressing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous, or conspiratorial.
Given that we know governments tend to define their own reality and apply their own labels to any action or statement that challenges their authority, this should be alarming across the political spectrum.
The point is, you don't have to like or agree with people who are silenced or disappeared online for their opinions, but it's dangerously naive to ignore the long-term effects of such censorship, because whatever power you allow governments and their corporate operatives to assert now will ultimately be used against you by the tyrants of your own making.
In the end, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thinking and therefore the minds of the people.
As I reveal in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictionalized equivalent, The Erik Blair Diaries, this is already happening.
About John and Nisha Whitehead:
Constitutional lawyer and author John W. Whitehead is founder and director of the Rutherford Institute. His latest books, The Diary of Eric Blair and Battlefield America: The War on Americans, are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at (email protected). Nisha Whitehead is executive director of the Rutherford Institute. Information about the Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
