The New Censors | City Journal
When I wrote in 2019 about journalists new antipathy to free speech, it seemed bad enough that they were targeting rivals in their own profession with advertising boycotts and smear campaigns that led to conservative journalists being fired and banished from social media. But since the Capitol riot, they ve gone beyond de-platforming individual heretics. Now they want to eliminate the platforms, too.
It wasn t enough to ban Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter if he and his followers could move to Parler so Parler had to be shut down, too. Big Tech obliged, succumbing to pressure from the media and their Democratic allies in Congress. (Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon forced Parler offline by booting it off its web servers.) This unprecedented suppression was denounced by conservative and libertarian publications like the Wall Street Journal and Reason, and by a few independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, but the usual solidarity among the press against censorship was missing.