Ending the censorship monopoly

Trump takes on the tech giants

“Censorship is the downstream manifestation of monopoly power.”—Roger Alford, deputy to Gail Slater, head of DOJ’s Antitrust Division.

When I read the media whining about their First Amendment rights, I remember this: They all cheered when Twitter censored President Trump.

The same people who sued to block Trump from blocking them demanded he be blocked from everyone. Their cries of defending free speech now fall on deaf ears and shut eyes.

A couple of years ago, Bari Weiss and a few colleagues on Substack told the story of how Twitter came to censor a sitting president. They began:

On the afternoon of January 8, 2021, Twitter decided to permanently suspend the account of Donald Trump. It was the first and only time a sitting head of state was kicked off the platform.

Twitter ostensibly kicked Trump off because of two tweets he fired off that morning. But on the day he was banned, executives and lower-level employees alike privately admitted that neither of the president’s tweets violated the platform’s rules.

Using the Twitter files released by its new owner, Elon Musk, Weiss and company said, “reporting from the Twitter Files paints a clear picture: that a very small group of unelected individuals is making decisions about what the public is allowed to see and not see on Twitter; that they have developed many tools—operating without transparency—to influence public debates; and that their decision-making process was, till now, largely inscrutable.”

That decision-making process if social media giants is about to be tested in court. Trump hired Abigail Slater to head Antitrust and she is taking the tech censors on.

Politico reported:

“I can’t tell you what joy this gathering is bringing to me,” says Gail Slater. It is early April, three weeks into Slater’s new job as assistant attorney general for antitrust, President Donald Trump’s top cop on corporate monopolies. She has convened a forum at the Department of Justice’s hulking headquarters aimed at combatting the scourge of “Big-Tech censorship,” aided by a panel of whom Slater describes as “several of our most important MAGA influencers.”

She singles out one of those influencers. “As the great Stephen K. Bannon would say to his audience,” she says of the former Trump adviser, “it’s time for action, action, action.”

Slater passes the mic to Brendan Carr, Federal Communications Commission chair, who talks about using the tools of government to “smash the censorship cartel.” “Thank you, Brother Carr,” she says. She kicks it over to Andrew Ferguson, the combative new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who rails against the concentrated power that allows “the truly terrifying Silicon Valley elites” to censor speech.

The censorship is real. We need to slay this dragon. I left Google’s Blogspot for Substack because Google began arbitrarily removing posts from my blog. The power to silence can overwhelm a person. Now multiply that by thousands of social justice warriors working at Twitter and you had the banishment of a president.

Sometimes the censoring is comical. There is a YouTube channel called TED Talks that began 41 years ago by distributing lectures on CDs. Well, one lecture. It went poorly and it would be six years before they produced a second one.

Now it is all the rage. “Ideas Change Everything” it says.

Maryanne Demas disagrees. She wrote:

Economist Professor Gigi Foster delivered a TEDx talk titled The Manipulators’ Playbook at the University of New South Wales in October 2024.

It was a bold examination of how, in times of crisis, fear and conformity can be deliberately harnessed by those in power to manipulate public behavior and silence dissent.

Her message was a call to defend the freedom to question, to challenge authority, and to think independently.

The local TEDxUNSW team, who had worked closely with Foster to ensure her talk met TEDx standards, described it as “insightful and important.”

But when the video was submitted to TED’s US headquarters for publication on the organization’s official YouTube channel, it was rejected.

The reason? The talk “did not adhere to the TEDx content guidelines.”

Well, it is the non-profit organization’s call but it does seem dumb to me because it makes it seem like Old Teddy Boy wants to manipulate public behavior and silence dissent.

Google and Facebook are another matter. There is no reason for them to censor anyone in the USA because Section 230 protects online platforms from being held liable for the libels posted on them.

Slater—Trump’s antitrust enforcer—will rein them in and Politico does not like that:

Slater, who declined to comment for this story, made it clear at the forum on “censorship” that she is an adherent to the belief oft-heard among the MAGA faithful that America’s trillion-dollar tech companies have used their enormous stature to strangle personal freedoms of people whose politics they don’t like.

Trump is arguably among this group. “Big Tech has run wild for years,” said Trump on his own Truth Social network in December in a post announcing Slater’s nomination, shortly after personally interviewing her at Mar-a-Lago, according to a person with knowledge of their meeting. This person was granted anonymity to discuss transition meetings with Trump. But to critics, including Washington’s many tech-industry lobbyists and allies, Trump is more motivated by his own personal grudges against tech companies that he thinks have wronged him — like when, near the tail end of his first term, he issued an executive order attempting to weaken online platforms’ liability protections just days after X, then Twitter, attached warning labels to a pair of Trump’s tweets. The company condemned the presidential action as “reactionary and politicized.”

It would have helped Politico’s credibility if it had bothered to mention Twitter banished Trump.

The problem for Politico and the rest of the TDS press is no one really likes Google or Facebook.

Politico reported:

In November, the Biden-era antitrust division asked the judge in the case to break Google up, including by forcing it to divest its Chrome browser. Google recoiled, calling it evidence of a “radical interventionist agenda.” But in early March, the antitrust division’s Trump-appointed acting chief largely re-upped the break-up request.

The trial over Google’s penalty for behaving as a monopolist began before a federal judge in late April, the first real test of Slater’s ability to win cases in court. Closing arguments in that trial are scheduled for the end of May, and the judge is expected to issue a decision in August.

“In a time of political division in our nation, the case against Google brings everyone together,” Slater said, speaking outside the courthouse before opening arguments. “Nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake.”

Yes, thank you FJB for winning this case. DJT will take it from there.

The media has a decision to make on free speech. Either they support Slater and free speech or they are just a cartel of propagandists with press passes.