One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb?
The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good – regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.
One of history’s great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As László Ladány recalled, Mao’s decades-long campaign to remould the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War.
By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organised lynchings and public executions. These grim liturgies followed set patterns that once more were reminiscent of gangland practices: during these proceedings, rhetorical questions were addressed to the crowd, which, in turn, had to roar its approval in unison—the purpose of the exercise being to ensure collective participation in the murder of innocent victims; the latter were selected not on the basis of what they had done, but of who they were, or sometimes for no better reason than the need to meet the quota of capital executions which had been arbitrarily set beforehand by the Party authorities. From that time on, every two or three years, a new “campaign” would be launched, with its usual accompaniment of mass accusations, “struggle meetings,” self-accusations, and public executions… Remoulding the minds, “brainwashing” as it is usually called, is a chief instrument of Chinese communism, and the technique goes as far back as the early consolidation of Mao’s rule in Yan’an.
This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as China’s dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Mao’s enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their country’s own history, demolishing China’s relics en masse.
Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies.
Until now. As it turns out, an astonishing new release of discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden – in which NCLA Legal (New Civil Liberties Alliance) is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covid – reveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.
Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalising snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavour.
The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.
The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. And it rises to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, including numerous White House officials… In their initial response to interrogatories, Defendants initially identified forty-five federal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all within only two federal agencies, DHS and HHS), who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation and censorship.
Federal officials are coordinating to censor private speech across all major social media platforms.
The third-party social-media platforms, moreover, have revealed that more federal agencies are involved. Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials – including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the White House – have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants. YouTube disclosed eleven federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants. Twitter disclosed nine federal officials, including senior officials at the State Department who were not previously disclosed by Defendants.
Federal officials are granted privileged status by social media companies for the purpose of censoring speech on their platforms, and officials hold weekly meetings on what to censor.
These federal bureaucrats are deeply embedded in a joint enterprise with social-media companies to procure the censorship of social-media speech. Officials at HHS routinely flag content for censorship, for example, by organising weekly “Be On The Lookout” meetings to flag disfavoured content, sending lengthy lists of examples of disfavoured posts to be censored, serving as privileged “fact checkers” whom social-media platforms consult about censoring private speech, and receiving detailed reports from social-media companies about so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation” activities online, among others.
Social media companies have even set up secret, privileged channels to give federal officials expedited means to censor content on their platforms.
For example, Facebook trained CDC and Census Bureau officials on how to use a “Facebook misinfo reporting channel”. Twitter offered federal officials a privileged channel for flagging misinformation through a “Partner Support Portal.” YouTube has disclosed that it granted “trusted flagger” status to Census Bureau officials, which allows privileged and expedited consideration of their claims that content should be censored.
Many suspected that some coordination between social media companies and the federal government was occurring, but the breadth, depth, and coordination of this apparatus is far beyond what virtually anyone imagined. And the scale of this censorship apparatus raises troubling questions.
How could so many federal officials be convinced to engage in the clandestine censorship of opposition to tin-pot public health policies from China which have killed tens of thousands of young Americans and – let’s be honest – were never really that popular to begin with? The answer, I believe, is that high-level White House officials such as Anthony Fauci must have been simultaneously threatening social media companies if they did not comply with federal censorship demands, while also threatening entire federal bureaucracies if they did not toe the Party line.
By simultaneously threatening both the federal bureaucracy and social media companies, a handful of high-level officials could effectively transform the federal government into a sprawling censorship army reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, silencing any opposition to tin-pot public health policies with increasing detachment and certitude as this systematic silencing falsely convinced them that the regime’s policies were just and good. A few of these federal employees must have eventually let slip to the Republicans that this jawboning was taking place, which appears to have been how this suit began.
In plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty’s words:
Hyperbole and exaggeration have been common features on both sides of covid policy disputes. But I can say with all soberness and circumspection (and you, kind readers, will correct me if I am wrong here): this evidence suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal government’s executive branch in US history.
Michael P. Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. You can subscribe to his Substack newsletter here.
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This could turn out to be a huge scandal.
Of course the MSM/Cabal will likely keep a lid on it with the usual tactics:
Don’t report on it.
Report it but, only as cause Celebre of racist white uneducated red necks.
Blast it as dangerous misinformation
Censor it.
Start a new crisis
A few of these federal employees must have eventually let slip to the Republicans that this jawboning was taking place, which appears to have been how this suit began …
Wasn’t this always going to happen?
Social media is still relatively new, in that the temptation for governments in Western societies to try to manipulate what appears online has only just had time to be succumbed to, and now we’re witnessing what is unfolding.
But – in countries like the US and UK – with a change of governing political party was always surely going to lead to the revelation of these sorts of practices. After all, such is our party system, an in-coming government has every incentive to paint the previous administration in as black a light as possible.
Hence when the Republican’s get back in the US (presumably from early 2023 on) many of them will be aching to uncover and make public what the Dems have been up to.
Which points to a different question. Tempting though it must have been for governments to manipulate social media, to the point of breaking the First Ammendment (e.g. forthcoming Berenson v. Biden), surely they should not have been so dumb as to do so so blatantly, and so far beyond what would be publicly acceptable if more widely known?
Again (like the Cain article yesterday), what does this tell us about the quality of people at the heart of our governments? Pretty damned stupid I would say. And by my reckoning about to be found out, in a very big way.
It might be relatively new, but many users will soon realise that it tends to behave in a similar fashion to older printed newspapers – just at a higher speed.
This case could be hugely consequential, not because the eventual outcome is in any real doubt, but because of the sheer rampant lawlessness of it all – which could result in big changes.
While they’re not the defendants here, social media companies must have known damn well that what the government was doing was unlawful – they have tons of smart lawyers, and the First Amendment implications must have been screamingly obvious. They could and should have resisted, but didn’t. I suspect the implict threat was the removal of their Section 230 privileges, which just shows what bad law that is, and how it can be used to undermine the First Amendment.
I’m with Clarence Thomas – these companies need to be treated as “common carriers” (like railways or telephone companies) in order to prevent them discriminating in this way, and to prevent the government being able to influence them like this. That could have a major effect on how these companies behave outside the US, and at the least it would potentially enable citizens of other countries from evading censorship simply by logging in via a VPN with a US IP address. I just hope other Supreme Court Justices get behind Clarence Thomas on this. We’re now beyond the point at which this became necessary.
Clarence Thomas is a legend
Such a shame that Scalia did not manage to hang around another decade or two to keep him company
For a long time they were the only two on the court who had a real interest in applying the Constitution as intended
“enable citizens of other countries from evading censorship simply by logging in via a VPN with a US IP addreas”
Indeed. Much like we do to access RT to try and get a balance of propaganda regarding the conflict in Ukraine.
not because the eventual outcome is in any real doubt
At the risk of spoiling it for me, which way is this going to go?
In the UK Justice system about the only thing that isn’t in any real doubt is that judges will side with the government.
First Amendment case law is clear, that the US Government cannot in any way induce, cajole or otherwise influence a company or individual to restrict lawful speech. That would be considered “prior restraint”, and I’d be very surprised if this doesn’t come out as a 9-0 decision by the court against the government. Even “living Constitution” make-it-up-as-you-going-along Justices like Sotomayor will be unable to articulate any credible reason why this is not an open-and-shut case. It’s all just so blatantly unconstitutional that the judicial branch will have to slap down the executive branch with a big stick. There is simply no version of reality in which the government wins this one.
By God I love the First Amendment.
Many thanks. Let’s hope so.
I guess Berenson v Biden should be pretty straightforward as well then.
Looks like Fauci loves the Fifth Amendment, which presumably he’ll be hiding behind from January.
“that judges will side with the government”
Government against the indigenous population, yes.
Government against foreigners, especially illegal immigrants, no.