by Selwyn Duke, The New American:
As I had on many other occasions, in 2020 I warned of a “dystopia-delivering tech oligarchy.” I cited Dr. Robert Epstein, a liberal who’s the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and his studies on Big Tech influence. His findings were alarming, too. Big Tech, he warned, could shift 15 million votes toward a given presidential candidate at election time. That’s more than sufficient to swing a White House race, do note, especially given how close our elections now are.
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Oddly enough, though, neither Joe Biden nor any other Democratic office holder complained about this tech “oligarchy” back then. Yet lo and behold, Biden has changed his tune. In fact, in his farewell speech Wednesday evening, he warned that a “tech” oligarchy was seizing control of America.
What explains this epiphany?
Well, an inveterate cynic might suppose he’s just upset that much of Big Tech has stopped censoring for Democrats.
The Big Government-Big Tech Axis
Making this point Thursday at the New York Post, commentator Robby Soave calls Biden’s remarks “arrogant and hypocritical.” He then writes that they
should be met with scorn by all those who languished under the program of social media censorship for the previous four years — a program largely forced on tech companies by the Biden White House, as an example of the very kind of merging of government and corporate power Biden now claims to oppose.
Soave is not exaggerating. The average person may not be aware of the censorship; therein lies its effectiveness. (Though as the speech suppression became increasingly common, it touched more and more Americans.) The average search-engine user seeking political material, for example, will only see the search results presented to him. He won’t see what should have been presented to him but was relegated to “internet Siberia.” He likely won’t know about the conservative sites whose work he might have seen, had Big Tech not smothered them. (Read, for example, the 2018 article, “How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It.”)
But Big Tech has a multitude of censorship techniques, ranging from deplatforming to shadow-banning to limiting reach. I have covered this phenomenon here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, among other times.
Note, too, that as the Twitter files and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s recent revelations evidence, this was done with government complicity. The FBI and other Biden officials actually pressured Big Tech figures to suppress speech contrary to their agenda. In fact, Zuckerberg confessed, the censorship at Facebook got so bad that it was like “something out of 1984.”
Biden’s Brazen Gaslighting
As for “Biden’s” claims, here’s what he said (obviously written by others) Wednesday evening:
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
It would’ve been somewhat accurate if he’d said it threatens “a fair shot for every woke left-winger to get ahead.” But though Biden didn’t name names, as Soave points out, it’s not hard figuring out who he’s fingering. His targets are, among others, X owner Elon Musk, Facebook founder Zuckerberg, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Their “sin”? To some extent, they all left the Democratic Party phalanx of illusion.
Alienated by the Left, Musk became a staunch Donald Trump supporter. Zuckerberg vowed to nix Facebook’s third-party “fact-checkers” (i.e., fact-chuckers) and adopt X-like informational democracy. That is, a “community notes” system. Bezos’ trespass was milder: He merely refused to let the Post endorse Kamala Harris for president.
But be not deceived, emphasizes Soave, the Democratic pseudo-elites happily enabled this tech oligarchy until the moment it rejected leftist control. The commentator then mentions the censorship by proxy on the Hunter Biden laptop and Covid-19 issues, among other things.
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