Tech has led to more censorship

If you look at the history of mankind, the voice of the common man has been getting louder and louder. For centuries at best he could shout in the town square or seek an audience in the king’s court. With the printing press revolution, the number of people who could get their voices heard increased exponentially.

This got much better in the age of journalism with the proliferation of newspapers and magazines. Heads of states kept abreast with the daily newspapers which tried to capture the pulse of the people as best they could. The 24X7 TV news channels, thanks to the battle of TRP ratings, tried their best to woo the masses. The general populace as a rule would get their general view across through mass media.

The age of personalization of mass public opinion came in the age of the Internet. Now anyone with a bit of money could launch a website and propagate his views and post a blog with nothing but a device and an Internet connection. Technorati (now inactive) was an advertising platform and search engine that boasted of 4 million blogs in its network. That was unprecedented in the history of humanity.

The age of social media went way beyond anything that was imagined. Almost everyone has a social media account in the world today, even children. Facebook is touching 3 billion users, there are a handful of social media giants at 1 billion+ users. Many are in the hundreds of millions. Today anyone rich or poor can put his or her opinion, photo, video, or business information out there in cyberspace for the world to see.

Curiously censorship is now on the rise and the leading country for that is America, the home to Silicon Valley. Tech giants in the US adhere to a narrow rigid ideology and propagate that. They have been in the process of censoring, suspending, shadow banning and life banning all accounts they deem as not part of their narrow ideology.

They kicking out self-declared trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theory masters like Alex Jones. Then the most powerful man in the world was censored in the form of US President Donald Trump. Now they are going after the most powerful interviewer in (maybe in history) in the form of Joe Rogan on Spotify. The reason is Covid misinformation. But what is this Covid misinformation? It is not decided by doctors and medical experts, but Silicon Valley officials.

They even banned Robert Malone, who has been dubbed by some as “the inventor of the mRNA vaccine”. Who can fact check him? It seems the common techie can. They have censored millions and millions unchecked so far. Where this will end, no-one knows.