History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from ‘misinformation’.
Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking programme – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritising speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight years of increasingly aggressive content moderation, including nearly 100 fact-checking organisations operating in over 60 languages, Meta is now pivoting to a community-driven system similar to X’s model.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg first suggests that the censorship was purely a technical mistake, and then changes his tune near the end and admits what has long been litigated:
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. Government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. Government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
In many court cases costing millions, involving vast FOIA requests, depositions and discoveries, the truth of this has been documented in 100,000 pages of evidence. The Murthy v. Missouri case alone uncovered substantial communications through FOIA and depositions, revealing the depth of Government coordination with social media platforms. The Supreme Court considered it all but several justices simply could not comprehend the substance and scale, and thus reversed a lower court injunction to stop it all. Now we have Zuckerberg openly admitting precisely what was in dispute: the U.S. Government’s involvement in aggressive violation of the First Amendment.
This should, at least, make it easier to find redress as the cases proceed. Still, it is frustrating. Tens of millions have been spent to prove what he could have admitted years ago. But back then, the censors were still in charge, and Facebook was guarding its relationship with the powers that be.
The timing of the shift is telling: a Trump ally joining the board, Meta’s President of Global Affairs being replaced by a prominent Republican, and a new administration preparing to take control. But while Zuckerberg frames this as a return to free speech principles, the damage of Facebook’s experiment in mass censorship can’t be undone with a simple policy change.
The irony runs deep: private companies claiming independence while acting as extensions of state power. Consider our own experience: posting Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power” – only to have Meta remove it as “misinformation”. This wasn’t just censorship; it was meta-censorship – silencing discussion about the very mechanisms of control being deployed.
While tech platforms maintained the façade of private enterprise, their synchronised actions with Government agencies revealed a more troubling reality: the emergence of exactly the kind of state-corporate fusion they were trying to prevent us from discussing.
As we’ve covered before, we didn’t just cross lines – we crossed sacred Rubicons created after humanity’s darkest chapters. The First Amendment, born from revolution against tyranny, and the Nuremberg Code, established after World War II’s horrors, were meant to be unbreakable guardians of human rights. Both were systematically dismantled in the name of ‘safety’. The same tactics of misinformation, fear and government overreach that our ancestors warned against were deployed with frightening efficiency.
This systematic dismantling left no topic untouched: from discussions of vaccine effects to debates about virus origins to questions about mandate policies. Scientific discourse was replaced with approved narratives. Medical researchers couldn’t share findings that diverged from institutional positions, as seen in the removal of credible discussions of COVID-19 data and policy. Even personal experiences were labelled ‘misinformation’ if they didn’t align with official messaging – a pattern that reached absurd heights when even discussing the nature of censorship itself became grounds for censorship.
The damage rippled through every layer of society. At the individual level, careers were destroyed and professional licences revoked simply for sharing genuine experiences. Scientists and doctors who questioned prevailing narratives found themselves professionally ostracised. Many were made to feel isolated or irrational for trusting their own eyes and experiences when platforms labelled their first-hand accounts as ‘misinformation’.
The destruction of family bonds may prove even more lasting. Holiday tables emptied. Grandparents missed irreplaceable moments with grandchildren. Siblings who had been close for decades stopped speaking. Years of family connections shattered not over disagreements about facts, but over the very right to discuss them.
Perhaps most insidious was the community-level damage. Local groups splintered. Neighbours turned against neighbours. Small businesses faced blacklisting. Churches divided. School board meetings devolved into battlegrounds. The social fabric that enables civil society began unravelling – not because people held different views, but because the very possibility of dialogue was deemed dangerous.
The censors won. They showed that with enough institutional power, they could break apart the social fabric that makes free discourse possible. Now that this infrastructure for suppression exists, it stands ready to be deployed again for whatever cause seems urgent enough. The absence of a public reckoning sends a chilling message: there is no line that cannot be crossed, no principle that cannot be ignored.
True reconciliation demands more than Meta’s casual policy reversal. We need a full, transparent investigation documenting every instance of censorship – from suppressed vaccine injury reports to blocked scientific debates about virus origins to silenced voices questioning mandate policies. This isn’t about vindication – it’s about creating an unassailable public record ensuring these tactics can never be deployed again.
Our Constitution’s First Amendment wasn’t a suggestion – it was a sacred covenant written in the blood of those who fought tyranny. Its principles aren’t outdated relics but vital protections against the very overreach we just witnessed. When institutions treat these foundational rights as flexible guidelines rather than inviolable boundaries, the damage ripples far beyond any single platform or policy.
Like many in our circles, we witnessed this first-hand. But personal vindication isn’t the goal. Every voice silenced, every debate suppressed, every relationship fractured in service of ‘approved narratives’ represents a tear in our social fabric that makes us all poorer. Without a full accounting and concrete safeguards against future overreach, we’re leaving future generations vulnerable to the same autocratic impulses wearing different masks.
The question isn’t whether we can restore what was lost – we can’t. The question is whether we’ll finally recognise these rights as truly inviolable, or continue treating them as inconvenient obstacles to be swept aside whenever fear and urgency demand it. Benjamin Franklin warned that those who would surrender essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Our answer to this challenge will determine whether we leave our children a society that defends essential liberties or one that casually discards them in the name of safety.
Joshua Stylman is a tech entrepreneur and investor who co-founded and ran Threes Brewing, a popular New York brewery, until March 2022, when he resigned for reasons related to his public opposition to the New York City vaccine mandates. Find him on X and on Substack.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Morons rule ! Unfortunately
“Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?”
They are fools – at least anyone who voted Labour in Australia on the basis of “cheap green energy” is a fool, and anyone in the UK who voted for any major party other than Reform expecting to have cheaper energy.
I’m sorely tempted to use Hitler as an exponent of a politically sound strategy here¹. :->
It’s of no use to call people who have been fooled fools. That’s just going alienate them and make them dig in their heels wrt insisting that they certainly weren’t fooled. The trick is to un-fool them gently, preferably without them noticing what’s going on, to make them change their minds.
¹ Because of his conviction that a political movement which meant to have any success cannot afford elitism but must have mass appeal, that is, must manage to appeal to masses of factory workers politically associated with SPD and KPD.
I’m not advocating calling them fools in so many words as a political strategy. Just pointing out the current reality. Maybe you should go into politics (not a sarky comment – the world needs logical people in politics).
I absolutely suck at handling people.
[Not proud of it because I tend to get bitten by this, but that’s how it happens to be.]
Perhaps a shadowy Peter Mandelson figure lurking in the background?
I don’t like being “handled” and prefer straightforward honesty, but I guess I am weird. In my experience, it’s actually not that hard to tell when someone is being honest rather than rude, but maybe that’s just me.
” Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises”
Not sure the SNP want to Drill Baby Drill. Rab.C.Nesbitt would do a better job than those boys.
“rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change”…..Why is there something wrong with it!
Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs at venues throughout the newest and oldest continents. The largest continent of all just wants the cheapest possible energy to lift the other half of the continent out of poverty. Even despots know which side their bread is buttered on.
The second largest continent hangs in the balance. Luxury beliefs have a lot to answer for. If Governor Grewsom of California and the Dame from New York with the Hispanic name get their wicked way, it’ll be all beliefs for them and all no luxuries for you.
Grewsom and Dame best packed off to join chums Justin and Lucinda on a pristine Arctic island powered solely by breezes and sunbeams. What a foursome that would be. Good luck avoiding your turn on the emptying the privvy rota on cold and still, dark winter middays lasting for 4 months at a time. Have fun when Red Ed drops by for supper bearing frozen bacon butties. Bad luck, the microwave back-up battery ran out of charge months ago.
The most impoverished continent of all aspires to the energy riches whose largesse the oldest continent has taken for granted for over a century. Strictly fobidden on orders of the frosty foursome. Same goes for the proles back home. Our beliefs matter more than your energy prices.
A big unanswered question remains, who are the con-artist ventriloquists pulling these energy dummies’ strings? Along with the other big question of why did anybody ever fall for climate claptrap in the first place?
Answers on postcard please, sent back in plain English to the Club of Rome and the Jason Committee. Usual explicit two words should suffice.
The planet is perfectly capable of saving itself.
Latest from Whitney Webb….They’re rebranding the whole plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm7Ug42xhp8
These people won’t be around for much longer. Resistance to their evil is growing exponentially in two ways: understanding of the real nature of their agenda and the false science used to justify it and also people fighting back because it is becoming a matter of survival. Stuffed shirt bureaucrats will fade to nothing in the face of such undestanding and resistance. If you remember film of Ceausescu after he was deposed or any potentate once they are forced out. It is as if all power has gone from their demeanour they look like frightened husks. As Sun Tzu said. sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
It’s good to know that – 141 years after the invention of the steam turbine and after about century of all high-power applications on this planet being driven by steam turbines – ‘experts’ have finally discovered that they don’t really work. Or was this supposed to be a statement about some unreliable process for generating coal artificially? Maybe try mining instead. That works.
This guy is essentially spouting perfectly random nonsense by sticking words together whose meaning he obviously doesn’t understand. There is no such thing as a coal generator (unless they’re really trying to generate coal). Coal is burnt to heat water to turn it into steam which then drives steam turbines which are connected to alternators to generate electricity. Obviously, it doesn’t really matter how exactly the water is turned into steam, be it by burning coal, oil, gas or wood or some by nuclear reaction. Once the water has been turned into steam, the remaining process is principally identical.
The problem here is that crooked politicians get away with this kind of stuff, exactly as during COVID. They don’t even have to make sense when making up stuff. Mere flim-flam with technically sounding words and some mentioning of ‘experts’ is enough. Or so they believe.
Presumably these tame ‘experts’ did not say that Bowen’s government policy of sidelining the coal plants had reduced their operating hours and so the funding available to spend on their maintenance.
Trying to make sense of this gibberish is a mistake. That’s exactly what these ‘experts’ speculate on. They throw a few cheap words which mean nothing into the arena to distract from the issue at hand and other people then try come up with explanations what could have been meant by this instead of simply rejecting this out of hand and demanding that politicians actually talk sense instead of ominously waving their hands and whispering darkly about very important issues which aren’t ever actually named themselves.
It’s a safe bet that the sole reason this sentence contains an unreliable is to assert by implication that actually unreliable sources of energy, like wind, are really reliable, while actually reliable sources of energy, like coal, are really unreliable because people have been calling renewable unreliables already and hence, this must be politically defused by hijacking the catchy term and attaching it to the exact opposite of what it can sensibly apply to.
That’s same pattern also evident in cheap green energy: So-called green energy is anything but cheap, not the least because the state is willing to guarantee seriously inflated prices for it, and hence, whenever green energy is mentioned, cheap must somehow be attached to it to make people hope that the route through this valley of tears will eventually end if they put up with ever rising prices because of green energy for just a little longer. Just another two curves to flatten the week and then, it’ll all be over for good! Again and again and again and again.
Yes they gaslight us that the extremely efficient supermarkets are price gouging when its the cost of energy that is driving up prices, in production, transport and storage. They tells us they are addressing cost of living pressures by throwing our tax dollars around like confetti.
Why would britain have any concerns about what happens in australia with net zero when Rome is burning, right here at home?