Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, has performed an extraordinarily valuable service by giving us his new book #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. While the social media giants’ efforts to suppress all dissent from their far-left, anti-American agenda have been going on for years, few people are aware of the full depth and breadth of this sinister initiative, or of how it is much more than just a bias toward the left, but a carefully planned and coordinated endeavor that, if left unchecked, will do nothing less than relegate our First Amendment right of freedom of speech to the dustbin of history.
In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari tells the whole shocking story. For those who don’t realize the implications of what is going on, he includes a Prologue entitled “The Typewriter That Talked Back” that is as amusing as it is disturbing, and that makes abundantly clear even to the most technically challenged among us what is really happening to our foremost and most important freedom, right under our noses. Bokhari paints a vivid picture of a 1968 in which a typewriter refuses to type, typing instead its own message: “We regret to inform you that your last letter violated our terms of service (Rule 32: Abusive & Offensive Content). We have suspended access to your typewriter for 24 hours.” Newsstands remove from sale magazines that third-party “fact-checkers” have deemed to be “fake news.” The Post Office returns your mail because you told a joke in a letter that a censor found offensive.
It’s all funny until you realize that all this is exactly what email providers and big tech censors are doing to Americans today, every day on the Internet. In the pre-Internet world of 1968, it would have been preposterous. Americans would not have accepted it. But it has all happened gradually, as we gave away our freedom by clicking our agreement to dense and unreadable Terms of Service that turned over our right to say what we believe to shadowy, anonymous guardians of acceptable opinion. Most Americans today are only dimly aware, at best, that it is happening at all, and those that are approach it with grim resignation. After all, what are you going to do? Start your own Facebook?
Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have for many years advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. Bokhari makes an airtight case in #Deleted for why such action is necessary.
In the runup to the 2020 elections, the social media giants mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history, in 2016.
And this has been going on for a long time. Bokhari details how Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest depend upon Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides them with immunity from lawsuits, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in what is essentially U.S. government-sanctioned censorship (despite the fact that they are determined to destroy the President of the United States) and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.
In connection with all this, #Deleted’s Prologue is an extraordinary illustration of how far we have fallen, which Bokhari then details in the rest of the book. Would the American people (or the government) in any previous age have tolerated AT&T spying on our phone calls and then pulling our communication privileges if we expressed dissenting opinions? Yet as Bokhari shows, we are suffering much that and worse today.
Ma Bell was broken up by the government, albeit for different reasons. But it can and should be done: #Deleted makes an irrefutable case for how urgent it is that the big tech companies be broken up, before it is too late. The U.S. government has on many occasions used anti-trust laws to break up monopolies (and that is what Google, Facebook, Twitter et al essentially are). Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act highlights particular results deemed anticompetitive by nature and prohibits actions that “shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”
Couldn’t the same be applied to information? The United States government took down Standard Oil, Alcoa, Northern Securities, the American Tobacco Company and many others without nearly the power that Facebook, Twitter, or Google have.
If we are not free to speak and think in what is today’s Gutenberg press, then we could not be worse off. In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari has done us all a favor by opening our eyes to exactly how bad it is, and sketched out a way that free Americans can fight back to save our First Amendment rights. Now it is up to us to act.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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