Obey in Advance?
Zuck is not the only one skating to where the puck is going to be…
The first rule of fighting tyranny is simple: Do not obey in advance … because most of the power of authoritarianism is, ultimately, freely given and does not need to be.
Today, one of the most influential people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta decided his platforms Facebook and Instagram should ignore that rule.
Despite having propagated a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, by recommending content without oversight, Zuckerberg has today announced that they are rolling back their fact-checking apparatus across their entire platform.
They have abruptly removed most of their content standards, to allow — and presumably promote — hate speech towards minorities, the characterisation of women as “household objects” and homosexual orientation as a mental illness.
And they have added a number of Trump’s acolytes to the board.
The rule. No exceptions.
This is not a minor, incremental policy change.
Nor is Meta an outlier.
Obeying has become the rule, not the exception.
In fact there is little or no media left in America that hasn’t decided to obey in advance. Trump isn’t even inaugurated yet.
Disney (ABC News) capitulated in December to settle defamation suit they were widely expected to win rather than irritate the Trump administration.
Musk (Twitter) invested $275 million in the Trump/MAGA movement and is serving as First Buddy to the president-elect.
Bezos (Washington Post) lost his Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist this week because she drew him where we all know him to be: down on one knee.
Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram) has flicked off the safety catch today as I mentioned above and onboarded a number of Trump loyalists.
Kevin O'Leary (TikTok?) plans to buy the besieged Chinese social media platform after a request for Trump’s help on Fox News today.
With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok in the hands of sycophants and major publishers like ABC and WaPo already capitulating to the incoming administration’s expectations there is already little resistance.
The War on “Free Speech”
Meanwhile, despite the constant talk of “free speech”, the Trump machine is doing everything to bully everyone into keeping their mouths shut.
Aside from the ABC defamation case, they are also suing The Des Moines Register for publishing Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll that turned out to be wrong.
… and today they appear to claim, in court papers relating to the potential release of special investigator Smith’s report into Trump’s alleged criminal activities, that the republican’s new-found “Presidential Immunity”, cemented by the Supreme Court in 2024, extends to public opprobrium.
Yes, that’s right.
Everyone on social media has the right to “free speech”, however false or harmful it is, just so long as it’s positive about Trump because the president is now legally immune from criticism.
If that doesn’t sound like authoritarianism to you, I’m not sure what will.
… and there was no one left to speak for me.
So, why does all of this matter? Isn’t this all just a natural cycle? Aren’t these just nice fun guys who say crazy things because they care so much about freedom and love and stuff?
It matters to America… because everything that protected Americans from tyranny is in tatters.
Trump/MAGA now holds Congress, they’ve stuffed the Supreme Court, they’ve won the White House and they will eviscerate the civil service, FBI, DOJ etc. come 20th January.
Whatever you think of them, if you believe they would take total control of the entire American administrative infrastructure and then casually hand everything back in four years out of politeness and deference to a free-and-fair election process then you’ve never read a history book and you’re probably deluded.
It matters to the UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Hungary and Ukraine… because Trump and Musk are fully engaged in regime change to benefit what can only be described as the ascendancy of Russian and OPEC interests across Europe.
It matters to Denmark, Greenland, Panama and Canada… because Trump is aggressively threatening trade wars or military intervention for the annexation of geopolitical assets he has unilaterally decided would benefit the US economy.
… and most of all …
It matters to the rest of the world.. because there’s no-one left to speak for them. The vast majority of people in the world, especially the younger generations, are entirely conditioned by the content they are recommended on social media … and there are fewer and fewer mainstream publishers and virtually no social media outlets which aren’t - for their own economic expedience - bending over to service Trump’s agenda.
And again, whatever you think of Trump now … if there’s no-one with a platform, who dares speak for anyone other than Trump, then soon enough there will be no-one left to speak for you at all.
And of course, there’s nothing you can do to sway the mind of Zuckerberg, Musk or Bezos … but for your own sake — and for the sake of your kids, if you have them — get off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
They are not your friend. They were always addictive but if they were like heroin for the brain before, now they are laced with fentanyl and likely to cause real harm.
An elected president telling a profitable tech communications company that they should only be allowed to censor an individual citizen’s content that has been ruled unlawful democratically doesn’t seem very authoritarian.
A president that pressures tech communications company’s to censor an individual’s content that isn’t illegal is actually acting undemocratically and therefore authoritarian.
How have you people got this stuff so turned around from reality, black is white with you.