Yesterday was a day on which honest historians will look back and record Twitter and Facebook crossed the line and set themselves onto a path to become regulated as content providers, overtly blocking the dissemination of a true New York Post story containing hugely damaging information about Joe and Hunter Biden. It was the day that both social media giants decided to step directly into the presidential election, overtly intervening in it on behalf of the Biden/Harris campaign.
This is a frightening moment for our society, although – thanks to the efforts of the legacy and social media establishment – only a small minority of citizens understand it. It’s a page right out of George Orwell’s 1984, the moment when Big Tech decided to remove the mask and go all-in on becoming nothing but propaganda arms of the party they hope to help put into power over us.
Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz shot back, with Hawley appealing to the do-nothing Federal Elections Commission to step in and examine whether Twitter/Facebook’s actions constitute illegal campaign contributions in-kind and Cruz sending letters directly to Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg objecting to the actions:
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President Trump, whose administration should have been moving more quickly to regulate and break up these social media giants over the past four years for the good of the country, also weighed in:
Dorsey backed down somewhat late in the day, ordering his people to release the block in the Post story, but Hawley was not at all impressed:
All of this was inevitable – both Twitter and Facebook have been working to influence elections against Republicans virtually since their inception. The only thing that changed yesterday is that Twitter and Facebook decided to stop their laughably inept efforts to hide their actions.
These and other Big Tech companies have to this point enjoyed monopoly protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 exempts these big social media firms from being defined as “content providers” under the law; so long as they allow all content equal access to their platforms, they are able to do what they want to do and grow as large as the market will allow.
Twitter and Facebook have always been able to skirt this provision in the law by establishing “rules” limiting certain speech that they pretend apply to everyone, but which they have historically only enforced against conservative speech in any real way. Whenever they’ve been caught and questioned about it by congressional or other federal investigators, Dorsey and Zuckerberg have laughably written the clear discrimination off to “glitches” in nebulous and undefined “algorithms”.
There is no way to write yesterday’s direct election interference off to a “glitch” or an “algorithm”; thus, Dorsey lamely tries to attribute it to “unacceptable” “communication.”
New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari called the actions by Twitter and Facebook to censor this true story a “Big Tech information coup,” and “digital civil war.”
That’s exactly what it is, and if the Democrats regain all levers of power in our federal government, Big Tech will have won.
Shortly before the 2018 election, when it was becoming apparent that the Republicans would lose their House majority, I wrote that President Trump should use the second two years of his first term to emulate Teddy Roosevelt, focusing his efforts and massive will on breaking these social media giants who threaten our Republic apart.
Here’s what I wrote at that time:
Now, imagine another scenario: It’s January 2019 and President Donald Trump finds himself and his administration under unending assault from congress, where the Democrat Party has managed to win a thin majority in the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections.
The President is very frustrated because, as hard as it has been to get congress to do anything with its current thin GOP majorities in both houses, it is now impossible to get anything through the new #Resistance Democrat House. The Democrats are in the process of trying to impeach and remove him from office, but won’t be able to come up with the votes in either house of congress to do so, as their own house members who won traditionally GOP districts in 2018 are reluctant to adopt that fool’s errand as their own.
So, it’s gridlock in Washington, DC, and Donald Trump is not a guy who deals well with gridlock. He’s got two more years to get stuff done before his re-election bid rolls around, and is left with accomplishing things either through the regulatory process, executive orders or, if he can get his attorney general to act, the courts. What to do?
It may be that several giant social media corporations just answered that question on Monday. The leaders of Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and Pinterest all got together and decided – at the persistent urging of CNN and various leading Democrats – to remove radio talk show host and conspiracy promoter Alex Jones from their platforms permanently. The same kind of monopolistic action denying an American citizen access to their platforms and the commerce he derives from them on the same day. Classic corporate trust behavior.
Now, it doesn’t matter if you like these giant corporations or hate these giant corporations; it doesn’t matter if you like Alex Jones or hate Alex Jones. These companies are publicly-traded corporations who cannot by law band together for the purpose of restraint of trade or denial of access to any class of people, and that’s exactly what they did to Mr. Jones on Monday. And it’s what these huge corporations, along with their sister social media platform, Twitter, have been doing to conservative users of their products for years now. This is why, whenever they get caught denying access to conservatives, they always blame the issue on some sort of “glitch.”
And it’s not just trust behavior that they are executing here. They’re also in blatant violation of campaign finance laws. In a very real way, their actions amount to massive in-kind political contributions to the Democrat Party. They apparently believe they are above the law, and if Jeff Sessions turns out to be the worthless swamp skunk many believe him to be, they could be right, at least for the time being.
But if the elections go the wrong way this November, President Trump will likely be looking for ways to keep on #Winning on domestic policy during his second two years in office. Playing a Teddy Rooseveltian Trust Buster to the foil of these increasingly radicalized and abusive Big Tech corporations might have a real appeal to him, and could end up being just the ticket to taking the congress back in 2020 and winning a second term in office.
As things have worked out, this was all pretty prescient. The past two years have been a real missed opportunity for this administration, and now here we are.
Get out and vote, and stock up on ammo.
