Since Trump entered the political arena and proved the efficacy of sidestepping the legacy media and speaking directly to the people, a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech have joined forces to erect a Censorship Complex. Collaboration, funding, and groupthink connect these players, and an analysis of their functioning reveals six ways they operate to censor speech in America.
1. Big Tech Censored Speech It Didn’t Like
While Twitter censored certain speech as part of its coordination with other partisan actors, Twitter also censored speech in the normal course of its operations. And because Twitter was staffed heavily by Democrats, it was mostly conservative voices that were silenced.
As the “Twitter Files” revealed, “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a ‘Search Blacklist’ (for Dan Bongino), a ‘Trends Blacklist’ for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a ‘Do Not Amplify’ setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk.” As one insider explained, the visibility filtering is a “very powerful tool” “to suppress what people see.”
Twitter used visibility filters to keep certain users from showing up in search results, limit the reach of certain tweets, and ban certain users’ tweets from hashtag searches and the “trending” section. Twitter aggressively applied these filters to Trump prior to the election and almost certainly to other elected officials’ accounts as well. And while censoring the speech of Americans, Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to
