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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Maybe ,while they are at it , they can start surveillance on kids affected after their mothers or they themselves were Jabbed !
This is another example of the general woke pattern: Given a problem X, say, racism, the less harmful the actual effects of the problem become, the more hysterical the people making a living from manageing X act in order to distract from the fact that their well-paid positions have really become useless encumberances.
I was unaware until recently that there is a Chicken Pox vaccine. In the past children would be taken to Chicken Pox parties by their parents to be deliberately exposed to another child with Chicken Pox. The wisdom in this was that a child would be exposed to this virus early and develop immunity, which by and large is what happened, without much fuss. The reason I was given that children need the CP vaccine is that CP can be bad for some children.
That and society’s predisposition to believe that governments and experts must solve our problems.
And they’re not entirely wrong. Modern man has slowly degenerated into a soft, office bound creature that has few of the survival skills and sense of self sufficiency that our ancestors only a few generations ago had in abundance.
The most-recent example of surival skills I’m aware of involved a guy who was stationed close the ruins of Fleury in summer 1916 with his (German) army unit. During various earlier opportunities, he had grabbed a lot of gas cartridges and coffee powder. The men were all badly suffering from thirst and the only availble source of water was a large puddle with a rotting corpse in it. The guy with the gas and the coffee powder than started cooking bowls of coffee from this water so that they could safely drink it. But this probably wasn’t quite what you had in mind.
I would say that those with agrarian skills, of which there were still plenty in the mid 20th century, were pretty self sufficient.
Manual workers, of which there were many only 30 years ago, had plenty of confidence to do things with their own two hands.
As far as I can see, the physical skills of most young people these days are limited to their two thumbs.
That’s more what I was referring to.
People who engage regularly with the physical world are much less likely to be fooled or intimidated by our state bureaucracies and their invented or highly exaggerated dangers.
You seem to be living in a somewhat strange world. Neither farming nor manual labour of craftsmen have gone away. At the moment, there are 331 apprenticeships advertised in the small, rural German town (about 7700 inhabitants) my parents are living in. About 60% of these are certainly for jobs which don’t involve computer work.
I’m not sure if people without an account can see Twitter posts yet. Anyway, whoever put together this 7min montage of the usual UK criminals has done a great job. Just mind-blowing how it was all 100% blatant lies and there can be no justification from their perspective for the harms and tragedies which subsequently followed as a result of their flagrant deceit.
https://twitter.com/FunctionGain/status/1675247367899979777
We are still locked out Mogs.
I don’t know how long this is going to go on for. Musk says ”temporary”, but just how temporary is that? It’s a nuisance, everyone’s complaining about it because the number of tweets you view is is also limited.
Perhaps it is an underhanded way of pushing up subscriber numbers.
Ve vant names…
Remember this from 2022? The Human Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas talking at a Special Meeting of Board Supervisors of Orange County, California..the woman is on fire!
But she talks about ‘locking down for RSV’…and in the USA she says it has a death rate for children of 0.000004714.. or four one millionths of a percent….
….but if it saves just one life!!!!
https://rumble.com/v1ug65q-human-right-attorney-leigh-dundas-and-others-declare-never-again-to-orange-.html
I had a conversation the other day about the defibrillators that seem to have appeared in greater and great number. I was trying to discuss. 1. How many cardiac arrests happen close to one. 2.Would there be there anyone who can or is willing to have a go reviving a dead person 3. What happens when these things inevitably need servicing and or replacing, Is there some kind of benefit analysis, all of which was countered by ‘well if it saves one life, its worth it’. Well, how much are we prepared to spend.? Give everyone a defib in a backpack and a trained paramedic to accompany them about their daily business.? When compassion comes in the door, common-sense seems to go out the window.
Do you know which company makes them? If it is a UK one are we to become a “world leader” in this product? Very important to become a “world leader” where ever possible to our politicians, they think the electorate is impressed by “world leadership”.
Dr Mike Yeadon had a very good piece on this on his Telegram channel a few days ago – I haven’t really sussed the mechanics of Telegram yet – and he explained that to a large extent vaccination is a double edged sword and certainly where RSV’s are concerned, of which there are thousands, it is wholly the wrong way to treat and natural immunity is nigh on essential.
As I understand it the vaccination procedure basically undermines the body’s ability to fight and particularly so with RSV’s. Effectively, shoving vaccines in to children to protect against RSV’s is completely undermining their immune systems and they suffer more infections.
Funnily enough this is extremely profitable for Pharma. No…ooo I can hear you shouting. More bloody conspiracy theory.
Dead infants don;t take long to replace
Towards the end of 2021 I viewed a video clip from Ireland AM on One-Live TV based in Dublin. It showed a group of women eagerly demonstrating the application of face-coverings, these were home-made, to a doll. The aim was to practise getting “a nice tight fit” on a baby’s face and to “normalize and demystify” covering the face from childhood onwards. Viewers were encouraged to get their own small children to help and join in this exercise in interfering with the airways of babies. Viewers were also shown how to take nasal swabs of babies and make a habit of this risky business. I watched in disbelief and complained (in vain, of course) to my MP, even though masks were also mandated in Britain’s and NI’s schools around that time. There is an ‘ID with a mask’ setting on the I Phone and everyone knows how loathe to part with these gags the NHS still is. This article is chilling, because the first place it will lead is to covering the faces of our young, as night follows day. The vile and sinister practice of covering the human face is not going away.