<p>The Fed admits no fault in inflation, and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. And yet everyone else does know already, and more and more so. This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. In his letter to Congressional investigators, Zuckerberg flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now. ‘In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. ‘I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.’ A few clarifications: the censorship began much earlier than that; from March 2020 at the very least, if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through, but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels. The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. Facebook, as an information source, offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves. Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream. </p><img src="https://cdn.magzter.com/1641625061/1729758699/articles/GauKC18eC1730578966246/8527712287.jpg" alt="image"><p>What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that, including church and school closures, plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate. We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record, in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this. People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced! During two election cycles, the covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach. How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the U.S. elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced. A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr Scott Jensen, who made the covid response a campaign issue. Dr Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90 per cent and likely lost him the election. Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country were not legitimately elected, if by ‘legitimate’ we mean a wellinformed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives. Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates; the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilisation and set the path of history on a dark course. Zuckerberg, of all people, knows the stakes. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve. His admission provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times: the world-wide silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalisation of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times. </p>

Why did Zuckerberg confess now?

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