Social media censoring Trump is a liberal Pravda and we created it - Giulio Meotti

 

​ by Giulio Meotti

We let some Californian kids and their start-ups create a brilliant mechanism to block those are ideologically opposed to them

Twitter is just like Pravda. It is a monopoly. There is no other place to go.

In the USSR, they had to invent ‘samizdat’ (self-publishing) to get around it. This is the comment on Twitter’s closing of Donald Trump’s account by a leftist economist, Branko Milanovic.

That the largest social networks in the world have banned the president of the United States speaks much about the problem of freedom of thought we have created.

Because we created it. We have given all this power to some Californian kids and their start-ups and we have allowed them to become a monopoly, the "Gafa", and now they are chasing those who are ideologically opposed to them, becoming publishers.

They created a brilliant and infernal mechanism: censorship in the name of freedom, exclusion in the name of inclusion, discrimination in the name of the fight against discrimination, hatred in the name of the fight against hatred, intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Soon there will be no more mis-steps on race, gender, Islam, climate and much more. They will also check for commas. And they will also banner people on the left who are not entirely aligned, as is already happening.

“Cancel culture” is a leftist creation attacking many on the Left as well, like J.K. Rowling.

Twitter and Facebook have become political tools: Trump is censored, Ayatollah Khamenei is not; pro Israelis are attacked, pro Palestinians are welcomed.

Here, in fact, there is no left or right, there is the mental health of Western societies in the grip of conformity, the lack of pluralism, political homologation, the crisis of alternatives, a gigantic Netflix of information and entertainment.

And their answer is even unquestionable: “It's the market, beauty”. In fact George Orwell when he wrote "1984" did not imagine that the dictatorship of thought, Newspeak, the Ministry of Information and the antiphrasis would come not from the state, but from private individuals. And that is why it is all the more difficult to fight them.

They are doing and will do a great deal of cleaning up of accounts, books, articles, journalists, ideas and words "for our good". Social media, conceived as places of emancipation, have become machines for producing extreme thinking, marginalizing nuances. Minorities organize themselves in herds to silence the opposition. The hyper-democracy produced by digital technology will lead to dictatorship. It is no longer conceivable to utter a speech contrary to their leftist “doxa”.

Any debate is immediately disqualified. To doubt is to be a racist. Progressive discourses have gradually become an arsenal that claims to prohibit any alternative discourse. Reality is called to bow to the hegemony of the moral of the moment.

Faced with this shipwreck of postmodernity, a phrase by the Russian philosopher and writer Nicolaj Berdjaev comes to my mind:

“Utopias seem to be much more achievable than previously believed. And currently we are faced with a much more distressing question: how to avoid their realization and return to a less utopian and 'perfect' but freer society?”.

 

Giulio Meotti is, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/294643 

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