It has been my contention that Big Tech, Google (including YouTube), Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Twitter combined have the financial power of a small country, and some medium-sized ones. And they brought that power to bear against a competitor this week and kicked them off the internet. Perhaps permanently putting them out of business. But let’s back up for a minute.
Since President Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, they have been on a mission to silence and discredit him and anyone who supports him. Tweets were “fact checked” or deleted from the platform altogether, accounts were permanently suspended for merely telling a truth that the left found uncomfortable. They saddled Facebook posts with fake “independent” fact checks, which turned out to be either employees of Facebook, or come from bastions of fair-minded, journalistic integrity like the Washington Post and Politifact. Meanwhile, threats against conservatives and world leaders threatening other countries, including threats against the United States were allowed to stay up and to this day are still on the platform. Pages dedicated to spreading hate are allowed to stay up on Facebook, but conservative pages are taken down for suggesting that the election was stolen.
I have been telling you for a while now that this is very much a first amendment issue. The response is always something along the lines of, “they are private companies, they can do what they want.” All things being equal, that is true, but things are not equal. Big Tech has been working with and at the behest of the government for a while now. During a hearing in 2019, Rep. Cedric Richmond from Louisiana told Facebook and Google that they had “better” figure out a way to restrict content that he and his fellow leftists find objectionable or face regulation. But is that legal? According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the answer is no.
Cedric Richmond’s and other’s admonishment to regulate certain speech, along with Section 230 which allows these companies to censor content without fear of any legal repercussions, combine to give these companies near unlimited power to limit your freedom of expression. By completely deplatforming the president and his supporters, Big Tech has complied with government inducements to limit the first amendment rights of an entire group of people. Obviously, certain speech is not protected. You cannot incite or encourage violence or threaten to harm people in any way. The president did nothing of the sort and neither did the majority of his supporters. The only reason to go to such lengths to silence opposition is that you are afraid of what they might say.
The collusion between Big Tech and Big Government has done severe damage to our republic. It is going to take a concerted effort by patriotic Americans to pull us back from the brink. Get off of these social media platforms if you can. For some people whose businesses depend on marketing and advertising on these platforms, I encourage you to seek alternatives, because they remove all the obvious players, they will come for the little guys. The only way to respond is to inflict as much actual material loss as possible. For these Big Tech Tyrants, that means money. If enough people leave the platform, stop generating revenue for them, pull out of any investments you have with them, it will inflict material loss and they will have to take notice. They may not care, but when their market cap falls and they stop producing as much revenue, their boards of directors and the rest of the world will take notice.