In a chilling harbinger of the future, George Orwell wrote “1984” about how our liberties become extinct as information suppression and totalitarianism spreads and takes over the society.
Written as fiction, it’s become a classic literary piece illustrative of the far reaching personal, social and political impacts of a totalitarian society.
The unprecedented shut down by Big Tech of America’s oldest news outlet, The New York Post, can only serve as a wakeup call to freedom loving Americans to not stay silent.
The veil was lifted when the Post published a bombshell story that alleges Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop had been recovered in a Delaware repair shop. The shop owner made a copy and delivered a copy of the hard drive with its contents for public revelation.
If true, the emails reveal how Hunter Biden leveraged his family connections to enter into international business deals while his father was vice president.
At least one email suggests that money from a business deal would go to “the big guy.” Though “the big guy” is not named, Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski has confirmed “the big guy” was in fact Joe Biden. If “the big guy” truly is Joe Biden, then it suggests that the former vice president may have been involved in his son’s business dealings, which he has denied. This is an issue that is fair game for media scrutiny.
Neither the Biden family nor the campaign have denied the authenticity of the emails, texts or photos. Rather, they have claimed this is a “smear” campaign, even raising the sphere of Russian interference once again.
Instead of doing their jobs and asking questions a media blackout was initiated and Big Tech blocked access to the New York Post’s original story about the laptop. Major media outlets have slow-walked and suppressed the story.
The afternoon the story broke, Twitter joined Facebook in suppressing the article, barring its users from sharing it with followers, and then barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. Twitter locked the accounts of the Post and any user for retweeting the story.
They even locked the account of the White House press secretary. Yet, even as they blocked the Post, the tech giants allowed users to share stories published by anti-Trump media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times that sought to discredit the story.
There is no credible reason for this kind of targeted suppression.
President Trump has been the subject of countless stories that were based on unverified information provided by anonymous sources, yet tech giants claim they don’t concern themselves with fact checking, nor did they engage in censorship and suppression of speech.
But the story hasn’t gone away. Americans are more critical thinking than the mainstream media gives them credit for. There is no doubt that Big Tech’s decision was decidedly political in their effort to suppress damaging information about Biden — that’s election interference.
Although Twitter, Facebook and Google were once innovative platforms, they have come to function more like monopolizing powers. Twitter performs the role of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth — today’s instruments of suppression.
Orwell’s post World War II classic, published in 1949, foresaw the future, warning of what he called collaborators of the state, of a future totalitarian enabled by the media acting as an appendix of the state and agent of suppression.
So we shouldn’t be surprised by Big Tech flexing its political muscle.
In their reimagining of America, the vast majority of their employees are Democratic Party donors. Analyzing public finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics, they also found that for all federal candidates, the social media giants contributed 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats.
A study from the Media Research Center confirms Big Tech favoritism. Facebook and Twitter have hindered President Donald Trump’s access to the 21st-century public square by censoring the president and his campaign accounts at least 65 times over the past two years. Former Vice President Joe Biden and his Democratic campaign accounts have gone untouched.
Google executives and staff cried openly on camera after Trump’s 2016 win.
A fascinating documentary now running on Netflix, “The Social Dilemma,” outlines how the tech giants are able to control our news feeds. In authoritarian nations access to the internet is extremely restricted, and tech companies play a pivotal role in censoring what articles can be viewed, shared, and searched for. Big Tech has become Orwell’s Big Brother with its undisputed influence and army of economists, staffers, and lobbyists. But can you blame them? After all, “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Welcome to 1984 in 2020.
A healthy democracy with a properly functioning and independent press wouldn’t work to squelch a story. In a free society, it’s not up to journalists and giant tech to decide what news we should see or act as agents of the state. Isn’t that what we critique about China or Russia?
If you have to ask yourself “why America is so great” let me remind you that it is because we have free speech — our first amendment. I am able to write this op-ed and share a dissenting view criticizing my own political party — and not end up in a “reeducation camp”.
We thought we had escaped 1984 only to learn it’s not a calendar year but a treatise on corruption and totalitarianism that we are witnessing being played out before our very eyes. If we care enough to look, and vote.
Gloria Romero previously served as Democratic majority leader in the California Senate. You can follow her on Twitter @GloriaJRomero.
