Lying, exaggerating, or just being stupid is not new. These sins existed before the internet, and they will always exist. No one deemed them a national security threat until recently.
As a point of comparison, 9/11 was the deadliest attack in the history of our country, exceeding the death toll of Pearl Harbor. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives. The event led to a mobilization of military and government power that rivaled the Cold War buildup.
Public opinion largely supported a campaign of retaliation, but there were some disagreements and dissenters.
No One Censored the 9/11 Truthers
Among the critics, there was an enormous proliferation of “9/11 Truthers.” These were generally conspiracy theorists of middling intelligence who opined about structural engineering and other things they didn’t understand. They said it was an inside job or was known in advance, and some denied that commercial airliners were used in the attacks at all, even though there were millions of eyewitnesses and hours of footage showing exactly that.
Most people ignored the 9/11 Truthers because most of what they said was ridiculous. There was almost no effort to censor these people. No one said they should be “deplatformed” from the internet, removed from Google search results, or banished from college campuses. The idea that “platforming” meant tacit endorsement or that “deplatforming” was the right solution to bad thoughts had not been invented yet.
There was significant controversy when dyed-in-the-wool leftists like Ward Churchill said the victims deserved it, but even he was allowed to speak on campus.
Obama and the Public-Private Censorship Complex
The supposed scourge of misinformation appeared later, during the latter part of the Obama administration. It was made out to be a big national problem in order to justify hand-in-glove coordination between government agencies and private institutions in order to manipulate public opinion. Without acting directly to avoid violating the First Amendment, government officers persuaded and pressured tech monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to censor materials that officials did not want to be distributed.
They did all of this to advance a very narrow set of approved beliefs. The architects of this censorship regime labeled the system’s consensus Our Democracy™. Simultaneously, critics and skeptics of that consensus were defamed as election deniers, anti-vaxxers, bigots, terrorists, Nazis, Russian “assets,” and otherwise declared anathema.
This strategy did not come out of nowhere. We saw signs of coordinated messaging involving the mainstream media as early as 2008 when they did almost nothing to look into Barack Obama’s background as a radical, left-wing activist during his first presidential run.
Things then kicked into high gear in 2016. By that time, social media had eclipsed the importance of legacy media, the Brexit vote demonstrated a trend of populist rejection of elite opinion, and, in the United States, Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. These events worried the various players in the censorship game, and they correctly recognized Trump as a threat to business as usual.
Intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement worked closely with both legacy and social media companies to stop him. In the process, the media companies abandoned any pretense of neutrality, and this coordination continues through the present.
Fundamentally, all of this activity is premised on the idea that ordinary people need to be saved from themselves because they are too gullible, prejudiced, or prone to mass hysteria. The establishment believes it has the right to manipulate public opinion—through spying, censorship, criminal prosecutions, and lawfare—to counterbalance the populace’s self-destructive tendencies.
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