Tech Tyrant's Mea Culpa

We're running out of conspiracy theories because many are being proven true.

The latest is the 'conspiracy theory' that Facebook censored content under political pressure from the US government.

The CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has now admitted via a letter to a US Congressional committee that:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.

Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.

Now, I am not so naive to think the massive Democrat doner Zuckerberg has had a change of heart about controlling what you see online.

I suspect he can sense a shift in the political winds and wants to be on the good side of a future Trump administration.

He addressed his partisan funding of steal-the-vote initiatives (that's what I call them) by doing the mea culpa.

I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

They were designed to be non-partisan –spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities.

Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

Isn't it convenient that one of the world's wealthiest men tips in hundreds of millions to help rig the vote for the Democrats but now wants to be 'neutral'?

Zuckerberg also admitted to suppressing the evidence of the Hunter Biden criminal laptop at the request of the FBI.

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election...it’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation.

In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Frankly, the only reason Facebook is now admitting what it has denied for years is that it is worried about what is to come.

I don't think their censorship algorithms and partisan programmers will play a straight bat to free speech. They'll keep doing what they always do, playing favourites and deciding who is worthy of an audience.

Of course, Facebook is not alone, and neither is the US government the only one playing the censorship game. It's happening on almost every platform and within almost every government.

Those the tyrants can't influence then become targets. The campaign always starts with the low-hanging fruit (Telegram) and then pursues the bigger fish (Twitter, Rumble, etc.).

While Zuckerberg's admission is a step in the right direction, there's a massive battle ahead to protect our most fundamental liberties from government and the tech tyrants.

“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all."
Lois Lowry