Journalist Matt Taibbi — best known for revealing the Twitter files censorship — had this to say at a rally at the National Mall in Washington (September 29):

… our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it…

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.” “Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

“What the West needs is free speech, not tolerated speech,” MercatorNet, October 11, 2024

A critical question is whether freedom of information and freedom of speech matters as much to the average person as they do to independent journalists like Taibbi.

You may also wish to read: Twitter files 13 and 14… plus the critical bigger picture. Growing distrust of mainstream media should be supplemented by scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem. What both the Twitter files and other recent incidents show is that many alleged conspiracy theories about Big Tech control of news were not fantasies at all.