Today s Censorship Is Personal Æ Brownstone Institute

This takes us to 2020, when this vast apparatus was deployed fully to manage messaging on the response to the pandemic. It was highly effective. For all the world, it seemed as if everyone responsible was fully in support of policies that have never before been attempted, such as stay-at-home orders and church cancellations and travel restrictions. Businesses nationwide were shut, with hardly a peep of protest that we could hear at the time. 

It seemed spooky but, over time, investigators came to discover a vast censorship industrial complex that was in heavy operation, to the point that Elon Musk declared that the Twitter he bought might as well have been a megaphone for military intelligence. Thousands of pages have been amassed in court filings that confirm all of this.

The case against the government here is that it cannot do through third parties such as social media platforms what it is forbidden from doing directly by virtue of the First Amendment. The case in question is popularly known as Missouri v. Biden, and there is much at stake with its results. 

If the Supreme Court decides that the government violated free speech with these measures, it will help secure the new technology as a tool of freedom. If it goes the other direction, censorship will be codified in law and it will give license to agencies to lord it over what we see and hear forever. 

You can see the technological challenge here for government. It s one thing to threaten editors of paper newspapers or throttle communications on radio and television. But it is another matter to gain full control over the vast web of global communication architecture in the 21st century. China has had some measure of success and so has Europe generally. But in America, we have special institutions and special laws. That should not be possible here. 

The challenge of censoring the Internet is vast but consider what they have achieved so far in the US. Everyone knows (we hope) that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube are thoroughly compromised venues. Amazon s servers have stepped up in service of federal priorities such as when the company shut down Parler on January 10, 2021. Even auspicious services like EventBrite serve their masters: Brownstone even had an event canceled by this company. At whose behest? 

Indeed, when you look at the lay of the land today, the reed on which free speech still stands is pretty thin. What if Peter Thiel had not invested in Rumble? What if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter? What if we didn t have ProtonMail and other foreign providers? What if there were no truly private server companies? For that matter, what if we had only to rely on PayPal and conventional banks for sending money? Our freedoms that we know now would gradually come to an end.

These days, and thanks to technological advancements, speech has become deeply personal. As communication has become democratized, so have the censorship efforts. If everyone has a microphone, everyone has to be controlled. The efforts to do so affect the  tools and services everyone uses every day.. 

The outcome of Missouri v. Biden the Biden administration has fought the case at every step  could make the difference as to whether the US will recapture its former distinction as the land of the free and home of the brave. It s hard to imagine that the Supreme Court will decide any other way than to smack down the federal censors, but we cannot know for sure these days. 

Anything could happen. There is much at stake. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the pre-trial injunction against agency intervention in social media on March 13, 2024. This year will be the year of decision about our fundamental rights.

via brownstone.org

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