Technological Tyranny

The tech giants continue to censor dissent.

Since our nation’s founding, we have been a country largely defined by our civil liberties. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights protect our ability to worship how we want, love who we want, act how we want, and think how we want – as long as we don’t infringe on the rights of others. These freedoms make us feel good about ourselves, especially compared to other countries: the Chinese surveillance state consistently oppresses its citizens, and the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, poisons his political opponents and steals elections; even other European countries, including many of our allies, limit the speech and gun rights of their subjects.

This confidence in our freedom, our democracy, our rule of law, and our courts remains widespread among Americans, and is well-founded in historical fact. We’ve fought many wars to defend our values, both at home and abroad. Indeed, since the birth of the nation, we have been averse to tyranny – at least, we think, as long as we have the First and Second Amendments by our side.

But times are changing. 2020 isn’t 1776. It’s not even the 1960s, or even the 2000s. The largest threat of tyranny is no longer a foreign country, a person, or a political party. Instead, it’s with us every day, residing on our phones, our tablets, and our computers. Our rapidly evolving technologies – and especially social media – pose the largest threat to our democracy.

The threat makes itself known all the time. On Wednesday, the New York Post released a story that claimed to have conclusive proof of corruption on the part of Joe Biden. The Post had obtained (albeit through dubious means) a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son. Emails on that computer show that Hunter used his paternal connections to obtain a salary of $50,000 a month in exchange for access to the then-vice president. The story ended up being true, too; the validity of the emails has been confirmed by Hunter Biden’s business partner.

When the story first broke, the internet went crazy: social media users, journalists, and pundits pounced. Trump supporters pointed to the story as proof of the president’s comparative virtue, and Biden supporters scorned it as right-wing propaganda.

But soon, the scandalous article would become a secondary issue. Just hours after it was released, Andy Stone, Facebook’s communications director, announced that, in accordance with company policy, Facebook would be limiting the story’s distribution on the platform until a third-party fact check could be conducted.

Then, Twitter began suspending any account that shared the article, regardless of who it was. They suspended the New York Post’s main account, as well as White House Press Secretary Kaleigh McEnany, on the grounds that the article contained “personal and private information” and “Hacked Materials,” because it went against their privacy policy.

Conservatives, who have frequently been shadow banned (a way of silently blocking a member or user from certain online content) by Twitter and YouTube, decried these suspensions for being yet another case of the tech giants’ attempts to censor conservative voices. Many liberals, too, noted with concern the apparent editorial manipulations of supposedly open social media platforms. Others were less worried; they thought that Twitter and Facebook were right to block the Post’s story since, in their minds, it was obviously a contrived hit piece.

Ultimately, Twitter, Facebook, and Google can conduct themselves in whatever manner they see fit; they’re private companies who can ban who they want, suspend who they want, and control whatever information they want. But they should stop pretending to be neutral arbiters of information.

Let me give you a couple of examples of their bias. Last month, when the New York Times broke the news that Trump only paid $750 in taxes, where were Facebook and Twitter to hand out suspensions and police any accounts that shared the story? After all, the article contained “personal and private information” and had been obtained through illegal means – a similar concept to “Hacking.” Or, to give another example, did Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube suspend accounts who shared the audio of Melania Trump’s leaked, profane rant about Christmas decorations? Again, the answer is no.

It should be clear, then, that there is a pattern: the tech giants routinely censor, suspend, and edit the viewpoints they don’t like. And those viewpoints are often conservative, Christian, scientific, and anti-Woke. They have fired employees who argue simply for biological differences between men and women; they silently ban the opinions they don’t want. And, most alarmingly, they have zero accountability. They use their cultural power and their revolutionary technologies to harness and broadcast the religion of Wokeness and other illiberal movements.

Our civil liberties are under attack. And the biggest threat to them isn’t coming from China, Russia, Trump, or Biden – though some of these parties are certainly complicit. Rather, the most concerning threat is coming from within, from our culture, and from the very things we’re reliant on to function. The tech giants know we can’t live without their products, and they exploit it.

We’re addicted, it seems, to tyranny.