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punditman says…
We are the priests
Of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers
Fill the hallowed halls
We are the priests
Of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life
Are held within our walls
-Neil Peart
Those lyrics—from Rush’s epic 1976 LP about a future dystopian society in 2112—struck a power chord with me back in 2021.
That’s when I was censored by Facebook for posting a comment on a BBC thread. My “sin” involved linking to a Noam Chomsky interview on the polarizing topic of Russiagate.
Some person or some algorithm didn’t like what Noam had to say on the topic, or maybe the linked website had been flagged. My comment never saw the light of day and instead I received a message that I'd somehow violated Facebook norms. Not a unique incident but nonetheless unsettling.
This was before the revelations of the Twitter (X) files and Facebook files and Ctil files indicating how governments in liberal democracies have been behaving rather “illiberally” lately, pressuring tech platforms to hide and penalize millions of websites, posts and users in the name of countering disinformation.
As Kenan Malik in the Guardian observed, "The most worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against “misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical tweet, and demanding the personal data of users."
Corporate media retains massive dominance over how most Westerners get most of their news, and its reach and control over social media is also unmatched. While there remains a vast reservoir of alternative sources accessible online to consumers, suspension and removal has also become routine.
It wasn’t that long ago that the present moment would’ve sounded like some paranoid delusion—reserved for the "black helicopter crowd" of unhinged conspiracy mongers, or the stuff of sci-fi and 70s prog-metal bands. Who knew that the threat of autocratic technocracy that once captured my attention as a teen rock fan was a prescient warning?
Yet here we are.
When I really dug into this issue, I quickly realized it’s a massive rabbit hole that gets breathtakingly complex—which helps explain why I've begun, paused, then revisited this piece several times.
At the same time, it’s essential for any functioning democracy to have a genuinely pluralistic spectrum of views, and it soon became clear that we are moving in the opposite direction.
This is not to say that governments should not get their message out there or that there isn’t a balance to be struck between privacy and the obligation to protect the public from genuine threats. But the bar for censoring speech should be high, not the lowly spot we’ve landed upon.
Covid, Ukraine, Gaza and the Muffling of Speech
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted an unparalleled level of digital censorship. Regardless of one's perspective on its various aspects—the virus’ origins, lockdowns, mandates, early dismissal of natural immunity, vaccine efficacy and risk-benefit considerations—there was a uniquely collaborative effort between government and social media to suppress dissenting voices, including many distinguished scientists who proposed different approaches to COVID-19 policies, some of which ultimately proved to be correct.
In the U.S. this prompted a First Amendment free speech claim filed by Missouri, Louisiana and several individuals.
As reported by Bret Swanson in the Wall Street Journal:
On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech.
Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.
The Biden administration says their aim was to counter misinformation about COVID vaccines. The US Supreme Court has granted a stay on the Biden legal team's application, allowing them to resume collaborating with major tech platforms until the case is officially heard this spring.
Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the de-platforming of Russian media, the censoring of dissident podcasts and websites considered “linked to Moscow” and their cancellation and defunding by Big Tech. This mirrored what was happening offline, which included cancelling basically any and all things “Russkie.”
To cite one highly troubling example, Pulitzer-prize winning author and journalist, Chris hedges, had his entire archive deleted from YouTube, which he’d hosted for six years on RT America and RT International. This despite the fact there was not one show dealing with Russia.
As Hedges wrote:
What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a 10-part podcast called the “Caliphate” that was a hoax, or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F Stone reminded us, governments always do – lie. Challenge the official lie, as I often did, and you will soon become a nonperson on digital media.
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now.
More recently, regarding Israel-Gaza, Meta has been systematically suppressing, pro-Palestinian content posted on Facebook and Instagram, according to Human Rights Watch.
Crossing the Free Speech Red Line
Unlike the direct and blanket methods employed by centralized authoritarian regimes, digital censorship in the West still has a kind of “Wild West” feel to it.
There now exists a labyrinth alliance of government agencies, private companies, NGOs and political elites—working in concert with Big Tech—to essentially suppress information and views that run counter to the accepted "groupthink" on a host of issues.
Of course that’s not what our priestly overlords say they’re up to. They’re merely countering myriad threats—from malign actors like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea; alt-right MAGA types; anti-vaxxers, far left “tankies”—that our supple, mortal minds can’t possibly distinguish or decipher, lest we be led astray.
It’s hard not to notice a troubling trend: Namely, those who veer too far off the spectrum from the acceptable consensus—to the left, to the right, up into stratosphere or wherever, also happen to be the ones getting flagged as "unreliable" or “conspiracy theorists” or “foreign controlled.” Who decides? Western state security agencies working in tandem with Big Tech, and private companies like the Pentagon-funded and State Department-sponsored Newsguard, who currently faces legal action in two high-profile lawsuits. That’s who.
Sadly, many people appear to be fine with this state of affairs, provided it’s the “other side” who is being silenced. This echoes the cancel culture of the left and the book banning of the right.
The world is a complex place and few issues are simple. Viewpoints can be mostly correct but partly wrong, mostly wrong and partly correct, and every shade in between. To approximate the truth one has to look at a genuine range of opinion, otherwise no learning occurs. History shows us that ideas and opinions that were once ridiculed often later become accepted and then embraced. But when information is squashed, societies stagnate.
Of course free speech has its limits. No reasonable person thinks there shouldn’t be online content moderation to counter blatant hate, or libel, or illegal activity. In fact, screening of user-generated content goes back to the beginnings of the World Wide Web.
But the issue here is not about community guidelines, thorny legal requirements or the terms of service of online platforms.
Nor is it about private platforms acting essentially like private tyrannies because, like it or not, under capitalism they are free give a voice to whomever they like or ban whomever they like even for trivial or self-serving reasons as Elon Musk as shown since purchasing Twitter (X).
What this is about is a fundamental principle: when government—even at arms length—gets involved in monitoring "wrong thoughts," and “shadow banning” and “de-platforming” certain websites or comments, a free speech red line is crossed.
The state should not be using Big Tech as a proxy to censor and suppress dissent in the name of countering disinformation or national security. And Big Tech should not be engaged in what amounts to political blacklisting on behalf of the state.
I can’t recall if I clicked Disagree with Decision or Request Review in my Facebook “appeal” back in 2021. But in Kafkaesque fashion, I never heard back from the priests of the Temples of Facebook.
It may seem ironic that I was able to post about, and complain about my experience back in 2021, on Facebook itself. But I think it demonstrates the sophistication of Western censorship compared to the blanket censorship employed by despots. Here in the free world, authorities can say: "What do you mean we are censoring free speech? We are simply protecting you from misinformation, and trust us, we know it when we see it. Besides, you are free to talk about how you think we’re impinging on your freedom even though we are not...now...as you were, citizen!"
This brings to mind the first stanza in The Temples of Syrinx, as Neil Peart foreshadowed:
We've taken care of everything
The words you read and the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
It's one for all, all for one
We work together, common sons
Never need to wonder how or why
As long as we “never need to wonder how or why” the very essence of what it means to live in a democracy is at stake.
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to encourage Punditman to keep going, you can buy me a coffee below. Every little bit helps!
Good overview of a complicated issue! The billionaire/corporate control of the press and ultimately most of the social media, too, really is a fundamental problem. Countering corporate and government censorship is a chronic problem but it keeps changing all the time.