by Andrea Widburg
Having used their immense power to get Trump out of the White House, Facebook and Instagram still aren't done with him.
I have never forgotten — I doubt I ever will forget — Scott Adams saying in a 2019 podcast that the tech tyrants would ensure that Trump would not win again and, indeed, that no one who was not of their choosing would ever win the White House again. They'd slipped up in 2016 and learned their lesson. He was prophetic, and boy! did they learn their lesson. Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, having already banned Trump himself from their platforms, are now banning any content with Trump's voice in it from the platforms.
As was the case with all the other tech tyrants, Facebook and Instagram banned Trump after January 6. They've kept that ban in place even though it has become absolutely apparent that Trump did nothing wrong on that day.
Actually, to smart people, such as American Thinker readers, Trump's innocence was instantly apparent; to leftist ideologues, the only apparent thing is that no number of facts will ever change their faith-based beliefs about all sorts of things, including the Russia Hoax, Hunter Biden's innocence, climate change, or the bizarre belief that Hannah Gadsby is a comedian.
But back to the ban. For Facebook and Instagram, merely preventing Trump from having an account is not enough. He must be erased entirely, just as the ancient Egyptians carefully scrubbed hieroglyphics referencing disfavored monarchs or the Romans systematically destroyed statuary that once paid homage to leaders who subsequently fell out of favor. (In 1689, a German dissertation gave us the wonderful phrase "damnatio memoriae," or "condemnation of memory," to describe the primitive mind's belief that disfavored people should be deleted from history.)
Showing just how primitive the college-educated censors at Facebook and Instagram are, they deleted a video interview that Lara Trump, wife to Trump's son, Eric, had conducted with the former president. Facebook removed a video of an interview with former President conducted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, saying any content "in the voice of Donald Trump" would be scrubbed from the social media platform.
Facebook permanently banned the former president from their platform in January after the Capitol riot.On Tuesday, Lara Trump, a Fox News contributor, posted an image on Instagram of her sitting across from her father-in-law, urging followers to "Join us tonight!"
A group of Trump officials were sent an email from a Facebook employee, warning that any content posted on Facebook and Instagram "in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking)" and warned that it "will be removed if posted, resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it."
Here's the notice, along with Lara's comment: "….and just like that, we are one step closer to Orwell's 1984. Wow." But note too how this screen grab caught two comments from leftists cheering on the censors:
It's time for conservatives to abandon these platforms and to turn them into little leftist ghettos. These platforms make money based on their membership. You're not paying anything, but advertisers are paying the platforms for the chance to get advertisements in front of you. If you pull out, that creates a smaller audience for the advertisers and inevitably decreases the tech tyrants' revenue stream.
The real beauty of these leftist ghettos — and we do need a few conservative media types to stay on board to watch for this — is that they'll do what leftists always do: having banished their original enemies, they will turn on each other, with each person in a frenzy to prove him-, her-, or itself more ideologically pure than the next person.
Think: the Terror in France, when Madame la Guillotine, deprived of aristocrats, turned on the revolutionaries; or the decades of purges in Stalin's Russia; or the Cultural Revolution in China. The thing about the social media purges, if conservatives pull out, is that they'll simply be decimating each other — and, of course, no actual lives will be lost.
Trump may end up having the last laugh. He is now an official Florida resident, and Governor Ron DeSantis is pushing for legislation allowing Florida citizens to sue the tech tyrants for, among other things, deplatforming politicians. If that legislation passes and Trump runs again, that's going to be helpful.
Image: Facebook/Instagram damnatio memoriae of Donald Trump. Instagram screen grab.
Andrea Widburg
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/tech_tyrants_slam_a_few_extra_nails_into_donald_trumps_coffin.html
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