“Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.” —Benjamin Franklin (1722)
Here is my list of the five most perilous political threats to American Liberty and Rule of Law over the last decade, in chronological order:
First is the deep state fabrication of the Russia collusion lie to interfere with the first election of Donald Trump and then undermine his administration.
Second would be the Democrats’ bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy to ensure Trump’s defeat.
Third would be the election of the Biden/Harris clown show, whose domestic and foreign policy failures were colossal, rivaling Barack Obama’s disastrous record of failures.
Fourth is Biden’s implementation of autocratic diktats during the ChiCom Virus pandemic and giving the keys to control the entire U.S. economy and culture to an inept bureaucrat, Anthony Fauci.
And last but certainly not least, fifth would be the systemic redlining of free speech by Biden and his compliant Leftmedia and social media propagandists over the last five years in order to advance the Demos’ leftist agenda.
A common denominator in each of those political threats was the disregard for the First Amendment assurance of free speech. It is the Demos’ primary strategy for controlling public opinion in order to perpetuate their political dynasty.
That greatest of American curmudgeons, Mark Twain, once said in response to newspapers exclaiming he had died, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
The same can be said for exaggerated reports that BIG Tech oligarchs and their social media platforms have stopped suppressing conservative free speech and the reach of conservative user content.
So, some who do not use platforms like Facebook would ask, why does this matter?
Because Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platform, Facebook, is the largest of the social media giants with more than two billion daily users, including more than 250 million American users. And that is where a majority of Americans are getting the news that shapes their views.
Demonstrably, only one platform, X (Twitter), has eliminated restrictions on political speech. It was purchased in 2022 by Elon Musk, with the stated goal of restoring free speech to America. And we owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the speech-suppression racketeers.
In 2023, Musk exposed the speech-suppression racketeers, noting: “The degree to which Twitter was simply an arm of the government was not well understood by the public. And … everything was like Pravda basically, a state publication. … There was basically oppression of any views that, even I would say, would be considered middle-of-the-road, certainly, anything on the Right, and I’m not talking about far-right, I’m just talking mildly right.”
He declared: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. That’s why it’s the FIRST Amendment. Without free speech, all is lost.” He declared himself to be a “free speech absolutist,” and that the “digital town square is where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
According to his insider analysis: “Republicans were suppressed at 10 times the rate of Democrats. That’s because old Twitter was … completely controlled by the far-left.”
So entrenched is the woke culture in these platforms that Musk recently defined it as something more than Trump Derangement Syndrome. He says it is the result of a “Metastatic Woke Mind Virus,” which he defined as “a very, very divisive identity politics … [that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite.” He added, “I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is antimeritocratic and anything that … results in the suppression of free speech.”
Meanwhile, at Meta, the Facebook “fact-checkers” may no longer be part of its overt speech-suppression strategy, but that does not mean leftist Facebook speech-suppression squads within Meta are no longer actively suppressing free speech.
Fact is, this systemic suppression is imperceptible unless you operate a conservative page on Facebook like we at The Patriot Post do. Consequently, we can clearly document both the fraudulent shadow-banning and the resulting inability of our 750,000 users on that platform to see our content — despite the fact that they have asked to see it.
That brings me to Zuckerberg’s remarkable announcement six months ago about the Meta/Facebook commitment to free speech — a belated effort to catch up with Musk and X.
According to Zuckerberg: “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. … Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. … So we’re … simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
He noted the actions Meta would take:
First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers. … The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S. >Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it’s gone too far. … Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. … So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. … Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it is making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. [But now] we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. … Fifth, we’re going to move our trust in safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
He concluded:
Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
In short, Zuckerberg admitted the following is true: Fact-checkers, subjective content policies, and failure to promote certain “civic content” have been the platform’s primary methods for suppressing political speech. Moving his “moderating teams” out of California to Texas is an admission that Meta headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park has been a magnet for leftists. Finally, he attempted to note the difference in our “constitutional protections for free expression” versus those in other countries where Meta operates, but regarding whether Meta/Facebook has measurably changed its policies on free speech, that may be a distinction without a difference.
Here is what we know for a fact: Until Facebook’s speech-suppression tactics were implemented in 2020, our Facebook page was experiencing rapid growth. That growth came to a virtual stop for the last five years.
So, what is happening six months after Zuckerberg’s free speech commitment versus a year ago? There is no growth on our page, which is to say, the suppression of “civic content” continues.
All of the Zuck-bluster notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the suppression of our content since 2020 has changed.
The month before Trump took office, I urged that on day two, after first taking measures to demolish the Democrats’ rigged election strategy, that he should take aggressive steps to restore free speech to Facebook and other speech-suppression platforms. No doubt Zuckerberg’s assertions about restoring free speech were calculated to head off any Trump action.
Specifically, I noted Trump needed a plan to stop the censorship.
More than just complaining about it, here is a detailed outline of what Republicans could do today, starting with legislation to modify Section 230 social media protections under the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
The Section 230 revision must eliminate the liability protection shield for online platforms to ensure they meet the prescribed high standards of “neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination.”
Because the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is an act of Congress, it is thus subject to the First Amendment prohibition that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Until Congress takes action to modify the Section 230 protections afforded to these behemoth social media platforms, their selective suppression of speech will persist.
In order for The Patriot Post to have legal recourse to sue for speech suppression, that legislation would have to be in place.
Moreover, neither Trump nor Congress needs to wait for the modification of Section 230 protections. Trump could issue an executive order that would do what Facebook and Google fear most — restrictions on consumer private data mining. Trump and Congress already have the responsibility and authority to protect consumer data privacy.
In the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data, that would involve requiring explicit permissions regarding the collection of consumer data and profiles.
Here is the basic protocol that Congress could require or that Trump could immediately implement by executive order, which would restrict the data privacy pirates.
If Republicans actually want to protect consumer data, Congress already has the authority to do so by addendums to existing legislation regulating commerce. In the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data (which should be classified as private property), that legislation should include explicit consumer permissions regarding the collection and dissemination of their data, as well as full access to any profiles created by the data aggregators.
When it comes to invasive data privacy violations — the collecting and marketing of individual profiles — the ubiquitous blanket “user agreements” posted by the platforms are woefully insufficient. The vast majority of social media platform users have no idea of the extent to which they are actually the platforms’ products, and the data collected from them is a primary revenue generator.
Congress should enact legislation requiring that social media companies and other aggregators of individual data, including Google et al., be required to obtain specific and explicit user permissions for each and every transfer of such data prior to the collection of any individually identifiable profiling information. The requirement would be for a platform pop-up in each case, whereby the user must authorize or decline the collection of their personal data, and if authorized, the platform must then disclose how that data will be used, including the transfer or sale of such data to third parties.
The prospect of that legislation is why Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the king’s ring.
If Trump and Congress are serious about restoring free speech, they should threaten to enact data-mining restrictions, and they can accomplish that today.
Meanwhile, Republicans errantly think they can grow their constituents without leveling the field — busting up these social media monopolies and disabling their ability to suppress conservative free speech.
As for the legacy Leftmedia platforms, they have never stopped using their fact-checkers to suppress content.
And speaking of fact-checks, I am still waiting on The New York Times and The Washington Post to fact-check themselves on those esteemed Pulitzer Prizes they were awarded for their successful propagation of the BIG “Russia Collusion” Lie, especially now that it has been exposed as a deep state fabrication by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
This was a government conspiracy that is far more dangerous to our Republic than Watergate, for which WaPo also won a Pulitzer.
And a final word from Mark Twain from his 1873 speech, “License of the Press”: “It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. … But the trouble is that the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies. … There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.”
I wonder what he would say about the influence of mass and social media platforms on low-information voters today.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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