The Censorship Complex

 Yesterday, the Republicans new majority in the House of Representatives fired up their House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to hear from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger about the "twitter files" and what they have discovered about government censorship. Remember that the government should not be in the business of deciding what is true and not true, let alone censoring what it deems as untrue. But neither should it be using private companies to censor speech either, because that is still government censorship. The government can not escape the charge of censorship by leaning on private companies to do its dirty work. But as we shall see, the government did more than lean on social media platforms, it actually directed their behaviors.

Today, at The Federalist Margot Cleveland has a report on the hearings, and it is quite damning. In this case, it was the Democrats who were doing the censoring, but I am quite sure the Republicans would do the same. What we need to concentrate on is the fact that all of this activity is Unconstitutional, and that the platforms themselves need to be forced to fairly allow all sides, including the crazy guys to speak. The ONLY thing that should be disallowed are things that are illegal, such as doxxing political opponents including judges, and calling for the murder of opponents and so forth. You can read the whole thing at The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof.

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.

In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.

“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”

Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

Gentle readers can read the boring details of the events at yesterday's hearing for themselves. Back in the 1980s, a political group called the Moral Majority sprang up attempting to counter the now out in the open Leftists taking over the Democrat party. But many evangelical Christians believed that politics was too dirty a business for them to get involved in it. In truth, if the government was working as intended, they shouldn't have had to do more than vote for the person that best represented their interests. Unfortunately, the power and size of governments at all levels forces everyone to care about what government is doing.

One factor in the growth of government is the fact that few people know or understand the Constitution. The Courts have encouraged this by making the Constitution seem too esoteric for the average person to understand. But the truth is that the Constutition was written straight forwardly so that the average person can indeed understand it. The fact that all three branches of the Federal government routinely violate the Constitution with little pushback indicates we need to redouble our Civics enducation. Students need to understand what the government can and can not do, and jealously keep the government in its box.

In truth what we need to do is reduce the size and reach of government.  The Federal government for example has no business dealing with education, much less K-12 education.  These belong to the states and localities.  The Federal government has no business determining police forces at the local and state level.  So called "crime bills" are outside of the Federal government's powers.  The recent overturning of Roe returned one issue to the states, but there is so much more that governments have muscled themselves into.  We must muscle them back out.