Essay in The Atlantic:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to NormalGoogle used to say that their mission was to make all the world's information accessible. Now Google openly censors medical facts and opinions that different from official govt policy.
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
COVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. ...
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.
And now David Icke kicked off Facebook. He has spent many years advocating many outlandish theories, such as the world having been taken over by shape-shifting reptiles. But the reason given for booting him is that he disagrees with United Nations coronavirus recommendations.
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