Big-tech is taking aim at the voices on the right and silencing decent. They do this under the pretense that they are preventing violence and hate speech. This perhaps seems justified to many Americans.

But now voices on the center and independent publishers are being silenced as well. Utah Stories’ mission is to promote civil discourse and the voices on both sides of political debate. Recently we covered Black Lives Matter’s President Lex Scott and listened to her local goals and objectives for reforming our criminal justice system in Utah. But when we attempted to cover the protests on Utah’s Capitol Hill on January 6th  we had a post banned by Instagram. 

We want to believe that this ban was the result of their bots and their algorithm inaccurately tagging our photo (which was of two musicians). We want to believe that Instagram (owned by Facebook) doesn’t want to silence independent voices, but prevent the spread of hate and violence. But according to Debbie Aldrich of Creative Destruction Media, this is simply not the case. 

Creative Destruction Media is an independent international publisher. They have reporters all over the world, they were reporting on Barisma connection’s in the Ukraine to Joe Biden’s family just prior to the election. Their editor L. Tood Wood personally conducted interviews and they broke stories related to the payments that Joe Biden’s son was receiving, along with the references to the “Big Man” (Biden) getting his cut from the deals his son was brokering while he was Vice President. 

All stories related to these claims were reported as “Russian Disinformation” by the mainstream media and Twitter and Facebook banned all links or references to these new revelations. As a result of these reports being labeled as “fake news” by big tech, Creative Destruction was deplatformed and silenced prior to the election, including Aldrich. It turned out that all of the news that was being reported about Joe Biden’s son and his connections and payments received from Barisma, China and Russia were in fact true.

How is it that big tech could have so much power to completely squash a major news story that they want to label as “fake news”? How did the social media platforms gain so much power? How did we get here?

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How Did Big Tech Gain So Much Power?: Section 230

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects platforms from being held responsible for the content they host. It enabled them to set up their platforms and their massive servers without hiring droves of editors filtering the content. These protections have resulted in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube attracting massive numbers of creative producers and 1 billion users per day. They have become far more valuable than all other media companies on the planet combined. 

This is because they facilitated the ability of their users to become paid influencers, reporters, commentators and creators. This has been the most disruptive force in modern media since the invention of the television. But without the protections that Section 230 allowed, these platforms would have never reached their stratospheric levels of success based on their enormous user base. Facebook receives now billions in revenue from all sorts of businesses because we keep our eyes glued to our Facebook feeds; as does YouTube and Twitter. 

But due to the coercion by dozens of massive corporations and ad agencies who pulled their advertising from Facebook (due to them not practicing censorship to a greater degree), the social media platforms have complied and fallen in line to the wishes of the big corporations and big media companies. The silencing of the voices that might be inciting violence is the norm. But it appears that this is a real double-standard going on.

The Crack-Down on Independent Publishers in the Center

Utah Stories is actually more left-leaning in our content. We publish stories on food, travel in Utah, farmers’ markets; growth issues, and the environment. We are in strong support of all things local, but we have had some of our administrators’ accounts suspended by Facebook, preventing us from boosting our posts so that our followers can actually see our content. More recently we have had a post banned on Instagram. 

We feel strongly that the voices from both the left and the right need to be represented in our civil discourse otherwise there is certain to be more division; more fracturing of our society and a true monoculture of big tech; big corporations, and big media all uniting as one voice, no decanting opinions allowed. If this Orwellian dystopia of big tech; big government and big corporations only allowing one way of thinking sounds familiar that is because this scene has been masterfully presented in the past.

In 1984 Apple Computers created an ad that showed how their company and their computers were a means to prevent a “one-world new order” from happening. 

Sadly, even Apple computers are on the bandwagon of big tech’s efforts to silence those on the right, by removing the Parler from the App Store, and their apparent support of Amazon’s actions to remove Parler from the Internet altogether. If there is no means by which a healthy civil discourse can be facilitated the dystopia that will be created will be very similar to the Apple Computer ad from 1984. We must all agree to comply or be silenced. 

It’s indeed a strange world we are heading towards. If you would like to help support Utah Stories efforts to keep truly independent journalism alive, subscribe to our digital newsletter or our print magazine at UtahStories.com

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