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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I must be a lot older than I thought. I can still remember when banks looked after your money, and paid you a bit of the interest they made by lending it to other people who were good risks.
This woke stuff starts out with one or two fairly reasonable plausible things, but just gets pushed and pushed to absurdity and beyond. Each step into folly justifies the next one.
We shouldn’t discriminate against women. Agreed. Or Gay people. Agreed. and many steps later, we are giving special rights to people who’s sexual pleasure is putting hedgehogs up their backsides, and calling themselves Fifi, and any word to the contrary is at the pain of being labelled a bigot.
My only hope is that there is a line of maximum woke, where everyone just goes ‘hang on a minute. WTF is this all about.?’ and abandons it as a ludicrous waste of time and money. We don’t seem to be anywhere near there yet. Maybe next year.
The trouble is that it’s much more than just being nice to whatever minority groups you pick as your pet causes – it also includes being nasty to other groups, especially if they dare to challenge any of this nonsense.
I’m done with totalitarians pretending they are nice. Please bring back people who are just unashamedly selfish and we all know where we stand.
“and many steps later, we are giving special rights to people who’s sexual pleasure is putting hedgehogs up their backsides, and calling themselves Fifi”
So are they also going to pay for HRT for the women, sorry, “people with vaginas” who are going through menopause?
I’m on YouGov and I often get questions about what my firm’s policy is on supporting people going through menopause, and a variety of other specialist conditions/groups. It appears to be a thing, to have a policy for everything. I always answer that my firm’s policy is to offer what support we can to all our staff, whatever their issues, treating each one as an individual.
Cat flaps in the walls for those identifying as a cat
What about those of us who self identify as a giraffe, paid leave until our employer makes all of their doors and ceilings 12 feet high so we can safely go into the office?
“…[Goldman Sachs] became the first company in the U.K. to offer to ship working mothers’ breast milk home if they work overseas.”
My goodness me. I had to read that sentence five times before I understood it. And now I do, I still can’t believe it.
It’s like companies are trying to outdo each other on the absurdity scale.
The behaviour of the banks at the moment is akin to a psychopath trying to make friends.
They know it is in their best interests, so they they smile, pat people on the back, ask people about their family — but always end up saying exactly the wrong things at all the wrong times.
I imagine that the important bit is ‘they know it is in their best interests’ — it suggests to me that there are problems ahead, and the banks want to be able to say ‘I know we’re screwing over customers, businesses and even countries — but we’re very inclusive and just look at our efforts on climate change!’
Indeed – anyone who thinks the people that run these things really cares much about their staff, or cares especially about trans people or whatever, needs their head read (to quote the late, great Kerry Packer).
I wonder how much they pay their cleaners.
I think it’ marvellous the way the banks are becoming more inclusive, and that includes opening their doors to billions of pounds of laundered drug money from all around the world. Bravo!
“…when it was bailed out by the government for £45 billion…” – it wasn’t bailed out by the government, the government has no money of its own, it was bailed out by the taxpayer. The government took our money, my money, your money, and gave it to NatWest. The government didn’t ask us, the government doesn’t ever feel the need to, because the government treats the people with contempt. The government demands our money and does what it wants with that money – bailing out banks, paying furlough, paying Sharon to stay at home with her 8 kids, paying for bend-the-knee training, paying for experimental shots that are killing and maiming people, paying to promote hatred and division of those that didn’t do as they were told. It doesn’t, however, bother to use our money to fix the roads, to get people back to work, to ease the self-imposed cost of living crisis, to put food on the damn table. The government has not only failed us, it is actively engaged in a silent war against its own people, and it using our money to wage that war. It is well past time that the people clearly drew the battle lines. I want this mob out of my home and I want my f*ckin money back.
Brilliant.
Unless I’m much mistaken, the government is also at least moving towards manufacturing crop failures by prohibiting irrigation in summer due to climate change and then claiming crop failures were caused by climate change. And that’s decidedly crossing the line from being disorganized and incompetent to being outright evil as food production cannot be reduced without people dying. Even when it’s (very likely) not going to hit us first. Rather the people in food exporting third-world countries, at least for a while. But killing black people in Africa is something even the most ardent anti-racist is always fine with.
Alright, I know I am delving into the realms of total fantasy here, but one could almost imagine that, sometime in the fairly recent past, we were invaded by an alien species that is ruthless, acquisitive and dual, or even multiple gendered. Slowly they have worked their way into every part of our lives and are trying to make us accepting of all things trans so they can blend in better. The WEF young leaders would be another battalion tasked with creating a totally digitally managed world and population.
Okay, a bit of daftness for a Sunday morning, but when I look at people like Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Whitty and Bill Gates, I do wonder if they have just zipped themselves in!
And Tony Blair – the lizard features are literally breaking out on his face.
Could just be the monkeypox, I suppose.
Honestly! I couldn’t give a bloomin’ toss what pronouns, sex, clothes, ideas, interests the staff at Halifax, or any other bank have.
I just want them to do good banking!
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‘Stale, male and pale’: racist and sexist in four words! If there was any bank in the UK that refused to engage with this woke crap, I would move my personal and business accounts there right away, as clearly they don’t want a hard-working, conservative man as a customer! Unfortunately, I don’t know of any banks in the UK not up to their eyeballs with this nonsense.
I suppose from their point of view it isn’t a big deal: they’re owned by the state, they can offer staff the silly badges and pronouns at no cost and very few employees are likely to have any trans work done on them, given how trans people represent a tiny percentage of the population, no matter how many groomers in schools are messing with our children’s heads!
But if there were an alternative, I would tell NatWest to shove my old Woody’s Wobbly Wallchart and piggybank up their behinds and go elsewhere after 40 years of custom!
And if the trans people Nat West fund subsequently decide they made the wrong decision and were badly advised, I trust it will be Nat West paying the compensation as well.
I’m glad I’m not a customer of Nat West. It’s such a pain switching bank accounts.
I’ll never knowingly save or invest at NATWEST.
As wacky as this is; it’s an issue for the bank’s shareholders and management. If they agree then so be it. Those members of the public who still bank with this useless company and disagree are free to withdraw their money.
Drat, I was going to open a current account with the Nazi West after taking AndyM’s advice and closing my Halifax account but my cash is not funding Pagan activity. Byeeee.