Since the attack on the Congressional building last week, talk about censorship has increased markedly.
The most notable example has been the Parler app which became the conservative alternative to Twitter after that site began to moderate, and sometimes censor, political postings.
After Wednesday’s Trump rally/demonstration, several support platforms (such as Google) that make programs like Twitter and Parler available online, have refused to support the Parler app any longer.
Congress has been calling the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram into its chambers for months to give lengthy testimony before comically ill-informed congressional people. Representatives and Senators primarily scold these men and women for not implementing the particular species of censorship that they happen to believe is needed.
The CEOs bow and scrap appropriately and then go home to do as they please.
Now conservatives are whipping themselves into a panic over targeted, corporate censorship directed specifically against them and their movements.
In fact, Joe Biden has already begun to discuss the need for new laws to clamp down on “domestic terrorism,” which will certainly include additional provisions for warrantless surveillance, wiretapping, and censorship for “inappropriate” political speech.
But there is a deep irony in these conservative complaints about corporate giants like Facebook monopolizing online communications, and the growth of government censorship.
Oddly enough, politicians, journalists, and the public commonly discuss these issues as if Facebook and Twitter were public service providers!
They are not.
They are private companies that can do anything they darn well please in the area of content control. Their only real obligation is to make more money for their shareholders.
It’s called capitalism, remember?
And conservatives have always insisted that markets should not be regulated, unless of course it somehow improves the bottom line for the corporations we are now complaining about.
As a result, the American people face a barren, public communications landscape dominated by a few behemoth-sized corporations that have consumed and destroyed all competition.
It’s called unregulated capitalism. The kind conservatives adore.
People forget that all of these companies became the giant monopolies they are today because of government DE-regulation policies going back to the Reagan presidency — deregulation policies dear to the heart of conservatives.
Now everyone gets to reap what “they” have sown.
