The enemies of free speech

 Tom Slater:

Free speech, said Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist and escaped slave, is the ‘dread of tyrants’. Those words have rung true ever since they were uttered 160 years ago, when Douglass was railing against the mob censorship of abolitionist meetings. In 2022, Big Tech oligarchs and their cheerleaders, the self-appointed controllers of today’s digital public square, demonstrated just how tyrannical they can be – and just how much they fear free speech.

The past few years have been a grim vindication of one of the arguments spiked has been making for a long time. That Big Tech censorship to the ends of challenging ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’, once embarked upon, would only spread and spread. That once we allowed ‘extremists’ to be censored it would only be a matter of time before the algorithm came for us all.

In 2020, Covid, Black Lives Matter and the elites’ terror at the prospect of a second Donald Trump term combined to supercharge online censorship. It all culminated in the banning of Trump, then still the sitting American president, from all the major platforms in January 2021. Any hopes that Big Tech might wind its neck in after that outrageous intervention into democratic life were dashed this year when, to use a corporate term, Silicon Valley ‘diversified’ its collective censorship operation.

While we’d become accustomed to Facebook or YouTube deplatforming dissenters, this year we watched as the likes of PayPal and GoFundMe set about defunding them, too – and on a scale we hadn’t seen before. From the Canadian truckers to gender-critical academic Colin Wright to the UK Free Speech Union (FSU), a broad range of rebels were banned and deprived of their funds this year.
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Liberals in Big Tech appear to be primarily responsible for trying to rig the debates in their favor.  The exception to this policy is Elon Musk and they are attacking him with a vengeance.  I think Musk is on the side of freedom.

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