Is the Government Behind the Social Media Blackout of the Hunter Biden Stories?

 As a follow up to my post, Freedom of Speech and the Recent Actions of Twitter and Facebook,I received a number of emails along the lines of this one:

I'm not all that sure the government ISN'T blocking free speech. It

might be similar to data collection where the government collects data

by proxy using the phone companies, but even more hidden. Facebook,

Twitter, and Youtube are different companies and yet they all make the

decision to block the same articles and ban the same users on the same

date. In fact, Alex Jones was banned by all the companies at the exact

same time. Either way, something is going on behind the scenes.

RW response:

I am open to evidence that the government is behind the actions but such a theory without evidence lacks an understanding of Silicon Valley. I don't think the government is behind the censorship but, even if it is, I don't see that as the major problem.

The SV crowd is rabidly anti-Trump and they all hang out together so it is not surprising that they react in concert against Trump.

I recall Justin Raimondo telling me that he was once invited to the house of Google co-founder Sergy Brin. [Gaudy furniture, Justin told me.] All the major SV players were there. It was just after the start of one of the Iraq wars and they had Justin there along with other foreign affairs experts to discuss what their position should be on the war.

That does not mean they all think alike on all positions. Peter Theil was at the get-together Justin attended and he is much more nationalistic conservative than the rest, but for the most part they buy into the lefty soup which means socialism must be advanced "by any means necessary." That is they believe it is justified to lie, cheat, distort, whatever to advance the socialist cause. This is part of their deep belief system.

If you can get them alone for a while with a drink in their hand, they will tell you this.

If you aren't exposed to these people, it is very difficult to understand how they think. Their understanding of economics is very shallow but they play a rich man's version of viva la revolution.

There are certainly deep state actors who have infiltrated these organizations but it isn't like the leadership or the programming drone underlings need convincing that everything must be done to take down Trump.

But Trump is really a sideshow. The real battle is for freedom, which the SV leaders are not in favor of. They hold what F.A. Hayek called the fatal conceit, the central planning view.

And so, in the end, the battle is an intellectual battle to promote, in a very simple manner that which can be grasped by the masses, the dangers of socialism. If this is ever achieved, social media would face such an uproar when they attempted to block information that Priscilla Chan wouldn't even try to push the idea on Zuck.

Those who are advocating some sort of government regulation of the social media giants miss the point. Creating a new point of central power will only create a new power center that can be taken over by those who will do anything to gain power. The only solution is to win the intellectual struggle in support of free markets and private property.

The advance of free ideas can never be stopped regardless of what the SV crowd thinks or tries. The ruling leaders of the old Soviet Union were more "advanced" in their censorship than the SV crowd but, still, samizdats emerged.

The SV crowd is shallow in their understanding of economics but they also lack an understanding of socialist history. In the end, they are fooling themselves if they think they can successfully block truth and that socialism is some kind of paradise.

-RW