“Censorship is the downstream effect of monopoly power.”
~Roger Alford, second in command to Gail Slater, Antitrust Division chief at DOJ.
When I see the press complaining about their First Amendment rights, I recall this: They all approved when Twitter censored President Trump.
The same individuals who took to court to prevent Trump from blocking them asked he be blocked from everyone. Their complaints now about protecting free speech fall on deaf ears and closed eyes.
A couple of years back, Bari Weiss and a few colleagues at Substack chronicled the story of how Twitter ended up censoring a sitting president. They started:
On the afternoon of January 8, 2021, Twitter made the decision to ban Donald Trump’s account permanently. It was the first time that a sitting head of state was banned from the platform.
Twitter apparently suspended Trump because of two tweets he tweetstormed in the morning. But the day he was suspended, executives and lower-management employees both privately conceded that neither of the president’s tweets broke the site’s rules.
With its new owner, Elon Musk, releasing Twitter files, Weiss and company described, “reporting from the Twitter Files provides a clear picture: that a very small group of unelected people is dictating what the public can and cannot see on Twitter; that they have built many tools—operating outside transparency—to shape public debates; and that their decision-making process was, until now, largely inscrutable.
That process of decision-making if social media behemoths is soon to be put to the test in court. Trump appointed Abigail Slater to lead Antitrust and she is taking on the tech censors.
Politico has reported:
“Can’t say what happiness this event is bringing to me,” says Gail Slater. It’s early April, three weeks into Slater’s tenure as assistant attorney general for antitrust, President Donald Trump’s chief enforcer on corporate monopolies. She has arranged a summit at the Department of Justice’s imposing headquarters focused on fighting the plague of “Big-Tech censorship,” enabled by a panel of whom Slater calls “several of our most influential MAGA influencers.”
She targets one of those influencers. “As great Stephen K. Bannon would tell his listeners,” she claims of the former Trump aide, “it’s time for action, action, action.”
Slater turns the mic over to Brendan Carr, Federal Communications Commission chairman, who discusses employing the instruments of government to “smash the censorship cartel.” “Thank you, Brother Carr,” she says. She turns it over to Andrew Ferguson, the combative new Federal Trade Commission chairman, who inveighs against the concentrated power that enables “the truly terrifying Silicon Valley elites” to censor speech.
The censorship exists. We must vanquish this dragon. I quit Google’s Blogspot and came to Substack because Google started deleting posts from my blog on a whim. The ability to silence can engulf a human being. Now add thousands of social justice warriors employed at Twitter, and you had the expulsion of a president.
Sometimes the censoring is ridiculous. One YouTube channel, TED Talks, was started 41 years ago by sharing lectures on CDs. One lecture. It wasn’t great and it would be six years before they released a second one.
Now everyone has heard of it. “Ideas Change Everything” reads the slogan.
Maryanne Demas is not convinced. She wrote:
Economist Professor Gigi Foster gave a TEDx talk called The Manipulators’ Playbook at the University of New South Wales in October 2024.
It was a provocative exploration of how during crisis, fear and conformity can be selectively mobilized by authority figures to control public behavior and silence opposition.
Her message was an invitation to stand up for the freedom to question, to defy authority, and to think for oneself.
The TEDxUNSW team, with whom Foster had collaborated closely to ensure the talk was up to TEDx standards, called it “insightful and important.”
But when the video was put forward to TED’s American headquarters for posting on the organization’s YouTube channel, it was rejected.
Why? The talk “did not conform to the TEDx content guidelines.”
Well, it is the call of the non-profit organization but it sounds silly to me because it makes it appear that Old Teddy Boy wants to control people’s behavior and shut up opposition.
Google and Facebook are a different matter. They have no business censoring anyone in the USA because Section 230 shields online platforms from liability for the libels they host on them.
Slater—Trump’s antitrust enforcer—will bring them in line and Politico doesn’t appreciate it:
Slater, who would not comment on this story, made it plain at the “censorship” forum that she is a true believer in the view commonly expressed among the MAGA faithful that America’s trillion-dollar technology firms have abused their gigantic size to choke personal freedoms of individuals whose politics they don’t agree with.
Trump is arguably one of them. “Big Tech has run wild for years,” Trump wrote on his own Truth Social platform in December in a post announcing Slater’s nomination, just after conducting a personal interview with her at Mar-a-Lago, according to someone familiar with their meeting. That person was given anonymity to talk about transition meetings with Trump. But to their critics, including Washington’s legion of tech-industry lobbyists and friends, Trump is less driven by policy considerations and more by his own personal grievances against tech giants that he believes have hurt him — such as when, late in his first term, he signed an executive order trying to undermine online platforms’ liability shields just days after X, formerly Twitter, placed warning labels on two of Trump’s tweets. The firm criticized the presidential move as “reactionary and politicized.”
It would have been good for Politico’s reputation if it had taken the time to point out Twitter expelled Trump.
The issue for Politico and the rest of the TDS media is nobody actually likes Google or Facebook.
Politico wrote:
Last November, the Biden-era antitrust division requested that the case’s judge break up Google, including compelling it to spin off its Chrome browser. Google shuddered at it as proof of a “radical interventionist agenda.” But early in March, the antitrust division’s Trump-appointed acting head essentially renewed the request to break up the company.
The case against Google’s penalty for acting like a monopolist opened in front of a federal judge in late April, the first actual test of Slater’s skills at prevailing at trial. Closing arguments in the case are due at the end of May, and the judge is likely to rule in August.
“In an era of political polarization in our country, the Google case unites us all,” Slater declared outside the courthouse before arguments began. “Nothing less than the future of the Internet is riding on this.”
Yes, thanks FJB for winning this case. DJT will finish it off.
The media need to make a choice on free speech. Either they stand with Slater and free speech or they are simply a cartel of propagandists with press badges.