If the founding fathers of the United States saw what the country for which they shed their blood has become, they would likely be extremely ointed. All fights, battles, wars that had to be fought to constitute the most powerful nation on the planet today seem to have been forgotten, a great part of the nation today denies the sacrifices of its ancestors to bequeath a free territory where men and women could develop their lives without the risk of authoritarianism.
The First Amendment to the American Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free practice thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, or to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
This basic principle that has governed the American tradition, and which has been so often cited by great thinkers, activists, lawyers, journalists, philosophers, politicians, writers, among others, is today being trampled upon and ignored by a progressive left that is clearly dissatisfied with its opponents being able to express their ideas.
In Brian Stelter’s program on CNN, one of the network’s most-watched shows, Alex Stamos, a former employee of Facebook, was interviewed to discuss the “problem” that freedom of expression generates. It all started when Stelter explained that there is “an information crisis that is being perpetuated in my opinion by platforms that you worked on, Facebook, Twitter, among others.”
“What happens is that people have a lot of options to choose from now, they can choose what their sources of information are, they can choose which ones to influence,” Stamos responded. “I think that raises an important issue of our freedoms as Americans and the way we treated freedom of the press in the past is being abused.”
“Here there has to be an intentional work of social networking companies collaborating together to work on extremist (conservative) violence in the same way they treat Islamic State (ISIS),” he said.
He then implies that it was a problem that people had so many options to choose from, while making a false equivalence between Republicans and Islamic terrorists.
Stamos added that when he worked on Facebook one of the fundamental tasks was to prevent the Islamic State from taking advantage of the network to recruit Muslims, explaining that they should now focus on undermining conservatives in the United States.
“We have to break down the ability of conservative influencers to reach large audiences, there are people on YouTube who have more influence than CNN during the day,” he continued.
“And we have to figure out what we’re going to do about the OAN and Newsmax TV problem (the new conservative channels in the U.S.), these companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, to be bringing them into millions of homes, this is allowing people to seek out information they want.”
Stelter then bid his guest farewell, as if what his interviewee had just claimed was completely normal. Of course: conservatives are equivalent to ISIS, the media must be taken out of the loop by another trend, and social networks must find a way to bring down the influence of conservatives, basic things of a democratic country, routine.
It is worth noting that recently Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of the major communication platforms censored the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, who is not only the head of government of the nation, but in turn, the direct representative of all Americans, whether they like it or not. Despite taking out Trump, the Democrats and other left-wing media were not satisfied with the measures implemented by Zuckerberg and Dorsey, considering them as too little, too late.
Congressmen and others also call for more authoritarianism
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argued that “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are partially responsible for Wednesday’s events, period,” referring to what happened at the Capitol.
On MSNBC, another media outlet that has radicalized to the left, host Joe Scarborough along with Mika Brzezinski also attacked Big Tech for allegedly collaborating with “radicalism” in the United States:
“Facebook’s algorithms were created to exploit this type of radicalism,” said Scarborough. “Facebook and Twitter established their business models in a way that would lead to insurrection against the United States.”
“You have shown that you should have done this before – referring to the founder of Facebook – and maybe there would not be dead people, there would not be people following false scientific information about the coronavirus, maybe there would not have been an insurrection on Capitol Hil,” he continued. Really, the leadership of Facebook is pathetic, Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, you are pathetic.”
Scarborough continued to complain that aggressive censorhip was a new phenomonon and attacked the heads of Silicon Valley companies for not doing something sooner, despite the fact social media has been censoring conservatives and its political opponents since even before the Trump presidency.
In the United States, there is already an open and manifest discourse on the left and a core of important members of the Democratic Party to normalize censorship and persecution. On the contrary, freedom of expression is no longer taken for granted, while authoritarianism is now a public demand. The thought police are on the loose, and as in all tyrannical and collectivist regimes, they demand absolute obedience to the party line.
Never forget that revolution always ends up eating your children.
Emmanuel Rincón is a lawyer, writer, novelist and essayist. He has won several international literary awards. He is Editor-at-large at El American // Emmanuel Rincón es abogado, escritor, novelista y ensayista. Ganador de diversos premios literarios internacionales. Es editor-at-large en El American