Big Tech Can Make Sure Billions of People NEVER See Dissenting Opinions
Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
We’ve reached a critical tipping point in the United States in which we’re being turned against one another and silenced via wokism. I submit to you this hypothesis: Big Tech (social media, mainstream media, and companies like Google and Amazon) form an unofficial fourth branch of the government. They’ve gotten so big that they can make sure that billions of people all over the world are never exposed to dissenting opinions.
We all learn in high school civics (well, we did back when we had high school civics) that the government was made up of three branches that formed a series of checks and balances to keep any single group from holding too much power: executive, judicial, and legislative.
Now, on to my hypothesis. The government cannot constitutionally silence dissent or the free press. It’s right there in the First Amendment, which reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to private entities like Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon. They can censor anyone they want because they are not the government. So, is the government using these entities to censor opinions that they, constitutionally, cannot?
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and YouTube are all protected by the government.
Not only are they able to shut down any conversation they want, but they’re also protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. However, with this protection should ethically come the obligation to allow free discourse, something the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have been wont to do.
Here’s where their connection to the government comes in.
In my opinion, if they are protected under this law, then they must act impartially in their moderation of content. If they choose not to act impartially, then they should be forced to give up that protection.
That won’t happen, however, because the voices currently being silenced are those that are speaking in opposition to the current administration. Without breaching the First Amendment and governmentally silencing critics, they’re allowing these media and social media outlets to do it for them, making sure that the only voices that are widely heard come from one side of the spectrum. They can do this with full immunity and wanton disregard to liberty because after all, these are private companies, right?
Perhaps not.
If they are moderating only one side of the discussion and allowing the other side of the discussion totally free speech, doesn’t it stand to reason that they must give up this government protection? That if they are moderating the content, then they don’t get the protection of being a free speech outlet?
Here’s an example of biased moderation.
And moderating it they are. Look at this absurd exchange I had – or tried to have – on Facebook. For reference, the original post was about a dolphin managing to communicate with a diver to save his mate that was stuck and couldn’t get free without human help.
As you can see, the entire thing is absolutely ridiculous. There’s an option to click a button that says “I disagree with this decision” and when you disagree they say, “Thanks for letting us know.” Or in other words, “haha, screw you.”
I think that even the most left-wing true believer can look at the exchange above and see that I was not in the wrong and that if the first comment was allowed, so too, should mine have been. For the record – I’m not a Republican OR a Democrat. I’m also not a hypocrite and I don’t think it’s okay to totally silence one side of an argument.
This is important even if you aren’t a social media user.
Let’s say you never use Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. You never search anything up on Google. You never purchase books or other items from Amazon. You may be scoffing at the very idea of this concept because you don’t even own a smart phone. So this doesn’t affect you at all, right?
Wrong.
Dead wrong. Absolutely, positively incorrect.
The sheer number of other people that use these outlets as sources for their information, opinions, entertainment, and time-wasting means that nearly everyone around you is getting information from only one side of the spectrum. They believe what they’re seeing because it’s all that they’re seeing. They aren’t getting the option of viewing other opinions, so to a non-critical thinker, positively absurd things just seem like they’re perfectly normal. Because everyone thinks that way, or so it seems.
Let’s look at some numbers.
- How many people use Facebook per day? 1.84 billion people PER DAY (source)
- How much time do people spend on social media per day? The average person spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media per day. (source)
- How many things are Googled each day? More than 3.5 billion searches per day are performed on Google. (source)
- How many people use YouTube daily? 30 million people use YouTube daily and 1.9 billion use YouTube monthly. (source)
- How many videos are watched on YouTube each day? People watch 5 billion videos on YouTube per day. (source)
- How many tweets are on Twitter each day? There are 6000 tweets per second on Twitter and 500 million tweets per day. (source)
- How many books does Amazon sell? Amazon OWNS the book market. It’s estimated they are responsible for the sales of 90% of all e-books and 50% of paperbacks and hardcovers around the world. (source)
- How many people use Tik Tok? TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin have 1.29 billion active users worldwide. (source)
- How much time do people spend on Tik Tok each day? The average user spends 52 minutes per day on Tik Tok, but keep in mind these are short, bite-sized videos of 15 seconds. Sometimes 4 15 second videos are strung together but imagine the brainwashing power of 52 minutes worth of 15-second intervals. (source)
- How many videos are watched on Tik Tok per day? One billion videos per day are viewed on this social media site. (source)
- How much time do people spend on the internet, in general, every day? In 2019, it was noted that people spent on average 6 hours and 42 minutes on the internet per day. (source) I’d be willing to bet with the Covid restrictions that number has skyrocketed.
About the Author
Daisy Luther
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and lives in the mountains of Virginia with her two daughters and an ever-growing menagerie. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.