Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now (emphasis added).
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree… I believe the Government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns.
After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.
The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle.
Again, in my entire career of closely following internet traffic patterns, I had never seen anything like this.
Facebook as an information source offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves.
Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream.
What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate.
We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.
People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced.
During two election cycles, the Covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach.
How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the U.S. elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced.
A good example is the Minnesota Governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.
Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election.
You can listen to Jensen’s account here.
Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country was not legitimately elected, if by legitimate we mean a well-informed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives.
Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilisation and set the path of history on a dark course.
And it is not just the U.S. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable and deeply damaging policies.
When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgement. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.
Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said.
Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others.
You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK Jr. has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs.
Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the U.S., EU, U.K. and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve.
Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. It sees the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to one support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart.
It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should it take back the White House.
“Under Rob’s leadership,” said Biden upon Flaherty’s resignation, “we’ve built the largest Office of Digital Strategy in history and, with it, a digital strategy and culture that brought people together instead of dividing them.”
At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year.
Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times: the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalisation of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections and gaslighting as a way of life of Government in our times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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I have a feeling that lockdowns and furlough have inflicted serious damage on the work ethic of a substantial number of people.
This phenomenon has been endemic in Britain for some time now, and as you say lockdowns may have exacerbated it for some people.
A former colleague of mine summarised it nicely: ‘Nobody gets shouted at’.
Yes. I don’t like rudeness but we’re not disagreeable enough – disagreeableness is a trait we needed much more of during covid.
Right on. Calm, factual disagreeableness (with the focus on ‘disagree’ rather than being unpleasant) is vital for progress.
Fake niceness is destroying our civilisation
I am robust in bringing incompetence to everyone’s attention but I compare miserably to my spinster sister in her mid 70s. She is a large lady and needs a stick and she lets no-one get away with anything whether to someone giving her personal service like a cafe or online. Nothing is ever permitted to be below the standard she had assumed she would be offered. Airports, cruise liners, railways, cafes are all ‘fair game’ for my sister.
I have seen grown men grovelling at her insistence on proper service and as she also speaks loudly, everyone else listens in stunned silence, secretly wishing they could be like her because she gets everyone running around her.
Online, she berates everyone with two of her targets being Ebay and Amazon. I have lost count how many things she has be given twice, in their haste to placate her.
Of course, she is not a happy person and that is the rub with most people; they are not prepared to spoil the occasion; so suppliers get away with poor service.
”I don’t believe it!” Ah…classic.
Two episodes from yesterday evening coming to mind here:
I was on a concert (Revocation) at the Dome Tufnell Park London yesterday evening. The last band has just finished playing, the room was emptying quickly and everything was been shut down. There was a sizable queue in front of the cloak room and it was pretty clear that it’ll still take some minutes before everything had been processed there. People were also still emptying their drinks. It seemed unlikely that the counter staff was willing to sell another half pint to me but since I was rather thirsty, I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask. This I did and the reply “No, hahaha! We’re only selling water by now!” I found this rather annoying and thus replied with “I suggest you cut the silly jokes. They’re not making you look sophisticated”, went to the toilet and drank some water. I then obviously got thrown out for being unspecifically abusive. My idea of the situation, however, is that I was a paying customer and not the butt end of jokes the counter staff (a woman, obviously) feel like making and that a simple “No.” would have been a much more appropriate reply to my question.
The train back to Reading reached Slough around 00:55. There, it stopped for about 40 minutes because a passenger had reportedly fallen sick and needed an ambulance. This means GWR made a few hundred tired people wait 40 minutes in the middle of the night, with periodic “We’re sorry but we cannot presently tell when the train wil get going again. Thanks for your patience” announcements as icing on the cake, because it was apparently impossible to get the sick person off the train and under someone’s care who could then wait for the ambulance instead of forcing everone on the train to join in the wait for no particular reason.
I’ve come to regard both as typically English: Service personnel is always (not always, but really frequently) impertinent because any customer complaint can be dealt with by having customers manhandled by the bouncers. And Nothing works but nobody’s responsible for that! aka Nobody here is getting paid to think on the job! is just the way people employed by large companies always operate.
I’d say that’s not untypical.
Service usually better from family-run businesses where the owner is present most/all of them time and/or staff working there (family or otherwise) feel they have a stake in it.
My mindset at the moment would lead me to think the passenger was another casualty of mRNA injections, although that time of night other substances might have been involved.
When everyone owns everything, nobody owns anything.
Nobody cares, because nobody has personal responsibility nor their own money on the line (so they think).
Travelling from Cyprus to Stanstead in 2008 my plane arrived on time and there was nobody there at the immigration desks. We all had to wait an hour before the work-shy civil servants turned up to let us in.
I recall another occasion in which I travelled from Budapest without a hitch, only to find that the trains were restricted to 20mph for some reason connected with lack of track maintenance.
The current shambles has been a long time coming.
I thought the author was Toby Young until I got to the end, but thanks instead to David. The pyschology, the cultural degeneration. Well analysed and expressed.
And in other news, Sweden are forced to chuck millions of doses of bioweapons away due to lack of demand. Word’s getting out then…
”Finally we have some good news, this time coming out of my home country of Sweden.
Just a few weeks after a massive conference in Stockholm where top doctors warned about the dangers of the mRNA shots, news is coming out that Sweden has thrown away almost 8.5 million doses of the covid shots.
That means that around 1/5th of all covid vaccines Sweden bought has been destroyed. The cost to the taxpayer of buying in these shots only to be thrown away was a whopping $144 million. That is money that went straight down the drain because the state bought something that people do not want.”
https://petersweden.substack.com/p/throwing-away-doses
The other observation I have is that some employees have got used to being little dictators, bossing their customers.
i went to the Vermeer exhibition yesterday and these were timed tickets. You were given a wristband and I put this clearly visible on my handbag. One of the guards asked me to put it on my wrist. I asked him ‘why’. He then told me ‘these are the rules’…!
This now works on me like a red flag to a bill….so I asked him again ‘give me one reason….’ He could not come up with one reason, so I suggested he started thinking for himself.
All very childish, I know, but I am jus my fed up with this level of bullying.
My (CONservative) MP is so concerned about the wreckage his Government has created over the past 3 years that he’s stopped bothering to respond to my emails.
THAT’s where the problem starts and ends: with our Pretend Democracy and the low calibre MPs who have been foisted on us by the Party Machines.
Very well observed & assessed, also have you noticed how many roads including main trunk roads are Closed for various works even during normal hours ! It seems now that lockdowns have been perpetrated ,anything is possible by TPTB without a flying F- – k for the public that they used to have to serve with a modicum of perceived respect .
You should try Godfrey Bloom. He fit the bill. And he’s been right on all this Covid nonsense from the start.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
They’ve all got pound shop degrees in communications and they’re the same vapid clueless drones who force me to be friends with inanimate objects. In my gym, the broken machines are hung with signs that chirp “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little under the weather today.” And my plastic bag in the supermarket introduces itself with a “Hi, I’m you’re new sustainable bag for life.”
Coming soon: “Hi, I’m your handy new digital pound app and carbon footprint pal.”
The deliberate infantilisation and dumbing down of everything is an important step when you’re trying to build a global tyranny.
M&S and Impronouncible Syllables introduce your new, sustainable bag for life. It was designed by the artist Impronouncible Syllables inspired by his experiences working at M&S and supposed to bring out the dreamer in all of us. The object thus advertised being a rectangular plastic bag in gratingly mismatched semilight orange, yellow, blue and green forming an unclear pattern of lines, splashes and dots. I guess the message must be Working at M&S on LSD means a bad trip is guaranteed.
How many readers are aware that it is still impossible to go to your post office and post a normal small parcel overseas?
Only one person I know was aware.
This started on 10 January when (allegedly) Royal Mail suffered a ransomware cyber attack. Googling tghis throws up a few results from a month ago and the odd extra result more recently. But basically, little publicity.
I have a Grandson in New Zealand who has a birthday mid- March. My wife bought him a tee shirt, some socks and a card and on 23rd January, having wripped it, worked out postage and stuck on £7.75 worth of the new self adhesive stamps with QR codes and a completed customs form, took it the the Post Office, only to be told they weren’t allowed to accept it. I hadn’t heard about the “cyber attack”.
Googling Royal Mail I found the appropriate announcement and noted that letters were “now accepted” and also business’s online ordered tracked and signed parcels (the most expensive and most dependent on Royal Mail’s apparently ‘poorly’ IT service.)
Even now, my Grandson’s pre-paid economy parcel can’t be accepted although it requires only handing over and dropping in a sack.
Noone cares that there is now no cheap way of sending presents or goods abroad. No-one cares that Royal Mail hasn’t recovered from this problem after a month!