John Hayward

Big Tech censorship is the malignant synthesis of campus deplatforming culture and U.S. tech companies working extensively with authoritarian regimes, especially China. They have grown enamored of China's demonstration that information CAN be controlled, given enough power.

We're also in the final operational stages of a 15-year war launched by the Left after Rathergate and the rise of the bloggers. They were very determined to neutralize the subversive power of bloggers on the Right and their ability to slip information past the media gatekeepers.

Those bloggers were, at the time, confident their voices could not be stifled in the new information age. The Internet opened thousands of doors that could never be closed again. No one would ever be foolish enough to try another scam like Dan Rather's.

But China showed it COULD be done. The Internet isn't really a limitless expanse of information that cannot be suppressed or policed for ideology. It has choke points - big platforms that can be controlled by either government censors or a few big companies working together.

You don't really have to impose complete silence and rigidly censor every single word to maintain ideological control. You just have to make dissidents shout through cupped hands while giant megaphones are handed to those who toe the ideological line.

Remember what happened in Rathergate, when a few intrepid bloggers with relatively limited followings broke a story that blew up into major media coverage? All the Left had to do was figure out how to arrest the "blowing up" process.

If you broke a Rathergate story today, you would quickly find yourself removed from YouTube, banned from Facebook, demonetized, yanked off popular social platforms. Major media is HEAVILY influenced by social media today. That influence CAN be controlled, and so it is.

Dissidents can't be silenced completely, but they can be denied the kind of billion-watt blowtorch influence granted to the preferred left-wing orthodoxy. Speed is vital to the viral spread of information. Big Tech is slowing down the Right while giving the Left the express lane.

Your viral Rathergate story might eventually gain some traction after Big Tech stomped on it, but it would happen very slowly. Entire news cycles would pass. Polls could shift and elections could be held before the viral story broke into heavily policed information space.

Big Media understands all this. They demand rush treatment and snowballing news coverage for the stories that fit their politics. Reporters spend a lot of time on social media boosting Narrative-friendly stories or even inventing them by stitching a few tweets together.

If the media politically approves of your story, it swings from one news hook to another like Spider-Man, never out of the top search results and top news aggregation sites. If it doesn't approve, your story trundles along through the back alleys of information space.

So the new censors can't really shut you up entirely, but they CAN slow you down. They can quarantine your information from achieving viral penetration by forcing it to spread more slowly, while the stuff they like spreads with insane speed and few "content rules" to worry about.

Real journalists, people truly committed to the spirit of free inquiry, would be fighting this tooth and nail. They would understand the SPEED of information is vital. Governments and corporate cabals should not be allowed to slow it down to protect their interests.