It’s like clockwork. Every time we get a new batch of proof that Big Tech companies have been censoring information related to COVID controls, vaccines, or other controversial topics, someone pops up with the same argument.
They say these are private companies and they can do whatever they want. They aren’t violating the First Amendment because that applies only to government. Private companies get to make their own law.
Ask yourself why a private company would engage in activity that directly contradicts its own mission and profitability metrics and do so systematically over a long period of time. For example, why would a carpet-cleaning company spread mud all over the floor and leave? Why would a fast-food restaurant put sand in its chicken sandwiches? Why would a candle shop sell a floral candle that when burned actually smells like a skunk?
In blocking information flows, especially valid scientific information rooted in evidence, companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are going against the whole point of their existence. They were all founded on the idea of busting up the news and information cartels, and empowering users. Why would they set up systems that went completely in the other direction?
The answer should be very obvious: There are people in these companies who colluded with outside agencies that had other priorities. We are now in possession of hundreds of pages of proof that this is exactly what happened. And is still happening now.
Just today, I was sent a takedown notice from LinkedIn that removed a post I put up yesterday. My post merely repeated the results of a German vaccine study of autopsies that revealed profound injury. It’s extremely important information that the professional networks of LinkedIn need to know. The company blocked it.
Elon Musk himself has had to spend several weeks at his own company working to ferret out all the spooks who had been embedded there for years, directing and controlling content-moderation teams. The core operations of this supposedly private company had come to be wholly corrupted by embedded agents of a censorious government machinery. That is NOT the First Amendment at work.
Or let’s consider this from another point of view, that of a government that wants to control what information the citizens have access to. But there is a problem. The country has a Bill of Rights and a law that says: “Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
What to do? It’s a problem for any tyrant. But some smartypants comes along and says, hey, here’s an idea. Let’s cajole private companies into doing it for us. How? We can threaten to regulate them if they don’t go along. We can use various other tactics like getting them to hire one of our guys on their content moderation team. We can go even further and dig up private information on managers and nudge them to go along.
It might take a while but if we focus, we can get there. We can take control over the essential parts of these companies and then we don’t run afoul of this pesky thing they call the First Amendment!
And so it begins. And the censorship starts and gets ever more extreme. Oh, and here’s another tactic. The government can appeal to the companies’ capitalistic instincts by paying for advertisements, and do so to the point that the companies become dependent on government for revenue. At that point, entities such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be in a position to influence management policy, same as any other private company.
The plot thickens further. Let’s say that government pays a private company to develop a product—let’s say it’s a vaccine—and that company gets rich because government forces everyone to take the medicine. At that point, the company has surplus revenue and can throw it around to the point that only companies on which their advertising appears thrive in the marketplace. That ostensibly private vaccine company is then in a position to carry water for the administrative state and its ambitions to silence any critic.
That’s how it works in the real world! Have a look at Pfizer’s advertising budget and where it goes and you understand more how it is that the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and DHS are able to exert such hegemonic control over Big Tech and Big Media.
To be clear, this isn’t some conspiracy theory. This is a conclusion easily reached from every bit of evidence we have. These companies are private in name only. Their management has been taken over by deep-state actors. That has been going on for years, but it has seriously intensified from March 2020 to the present day.
The takeover of Twitter was a fluke. It’s a crack in an otherwise solid edifice of control and wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s now a rogue company in an otherwise impenetrable network of control in which government does through private companies what it can’t do directly.
These days, the distinction between public and private is only conceptual. It’s the kind of thing you learn as an undergraduate—an excellent heuristic but not always applicable in the real world, as my mentor Murray Rothbard knew very well. That’s why so much of his literary oeuvre focuses on interlocking networks of ruling-class elites.
At some point, we all need to grow up and realize that Big Business and Big Government operate in a Venn diagram of overlapping interests. It’s not always easy to figure out but, in this case, it’s unbearably obvious. Big Tech has become a vehicle for ruling-class interests, and government itself has cracked the code of how to enable oppression through ostensibly private institutions.
In conclusion, yes, private companies can curate their own services. However, you see them quacking like a duck, walking like a duck, funded by ducks, and depending on ducks for growth, it’s a duck, by which I mean an outpost for powerful elites in government. At that point, the means by which we deal with it change. Ideally, there would be an Elon Musk out there to buy them all and set them free. Sadly, it appears that Musk is a black swan.
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