How convenient that Facebook
‘whistleblowers’ are emerging at exactly the same time as the social media
giant is seeking to “reduce the presence of politics” on the site. What this
means for freedom of speech is glaringly obvious.
If you had told me during the years I sat
with Nick Clegg in the British Parliament that the achingly liberal member for
Sheffield Hallam – later to become deputy prime minister of the UK and Sir Nick
– would become the chief censor of the biggest public square on the planet,
Facebook, I would never have believed it.
In the 2010 general election, when Clegg
got the Liberal Democrats off to a flying start in the televised debates, “I agree with Nick” became the catchphrase of his
trailing opponents. What began as an expedient has now become compulsory.
Because if you’re on Facebook and Sir Nick
Clegg takes a dislike to what you have to say, you won’t be heard for long.
I declare an interest. I am heavily
invested in free speech on Facebook. I have 600,000 followers on there – more
than nearly all UK political figures – and an audience for my speeches and
clips, etc. of many millions.
When I read Clegg’s pronunciamento
recently that he was going to cut back on political content on the platform I
saw it as a threat. Pictures of my breakfast are but a small part of my
Facebook oeuvre.
According to Clegg, “One of the things we have heard
from users both from the US and around the world since the election is people
want to see more friends, fewer politics. So we have been testing ways in which
we can reduce the presence of politics for people’s Facebook experiences.”
Then I
watched with fascination the orchestral maneuvers in the dark of a
congressional inquiry into Facebook where a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, was
whistling a highly convenient tune for the powerful – in the company and in the
powerhouses of the establishment – and I realized we were all being played. And
that Nick Clegg is no longer a liberal.
Facebook
will fight to the death to stop those with the “wrong” opinions
from being heard. Cue: something must be done!
Facebook’s
Whistleblower A was heard throughout the world. Another whistleblower, Julian
Assange, has not been heard for many a year on account of his incarceration in
Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London, facing the rest of his life
underground in an American Guantanamo.
Whistleblower
A was concerned about body-shaming on Instagram and other such ephemera.
Whistleblower Assange was concerned about bodies, quite dead, at the hands of
those like the congressional audience humming along with confected horror at
the tales of Whistleblower A.
And lo,
out of the west, comes news of a Whistleblower B. Another ex-Facebook employee,
Sophie Zhang, has volunteered her horror stories about Facebook Fake News
influencing elections all over the world.
Ms. B, a
San Francisco tribune, has not yet named and shamed, but the elections in
question are unlikely to be the ones – in Russia for example – when a
full-court NGO press was captured on video seeking to reduce the victory of
President Vladimir Putin’s parliamentary party, even if it meant boosting the
Communists!
More
likely she has the likes of Donald Trump in mind as the US rulers begin to show
signs of meltdown at the possibility of the Orange Man’s resurrection.
No doubt Ms. Chang will manage to cite
mysterious Ivans and Lis who are still toiling ceaselessly to install
favorable candidates in office in a way the ENTIRE Western mass media and
political class would never dream of.
The mood music is clear. The wrong people
have turned out to be just too successful at persuading the public that our
rulers and their principal narratives are quite naked. They have no clothes.
They must be stopped. And like the famous
village in Vietnam which had to be destroyed in order to save it, freedom of
speech must be extinguished in order to preserve it. It’s the liberal way…
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