The “consensus enforcement mechanism” of censorship on social media has not only been an attack on civil liberty but has also sapped the public square of a desire to reach the truth, according to journalist Matt Taibbi.
Where there was once a hunger for freedom, there is now a collective apathy over fighting to keep it preserved, Mr. Taibbi said.
“In parallel to this censorship program, I think what they’re doing with things like shadow banning and deny listing is they’re trying to simplify controversies and reduce everybody’s field of view,” Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
In doing so, the will to be curious and think about issues in a complicated way has been exhausted, he said.
“It’s making us less interested in fighting for our rights,” Mr. Taibbi said.
In 2022, Mr. Taibbi uncovered an FBI censorship operation in partnership with former Twitter staff, which became known as the Twitter Files.
In his speech at “Freedom Fest” in Memphis, Tennessee on July 14, Mr. Taibbi said what he found unbelievable was not the government censorship but its endorsement in society at large.
“The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation,” Mr. Taibbi said in the speech. “This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship, they believe it to be vitally necessary.”
The American public had formerly been known for its rebellious, fighting spirit, willing to protest government overreach, but what’s taken place over the last several years has homogenized that spirit into compliance, he said.
This homogenization has only been facilitated by social media, he said.
“I was one of the first people in the ‘mainstream media’ to worry about it [internet censorship] in the States, and one of the first things I was told is that social media is addictive, the same way cigarettes are addictive,” Mr. Taibbi said. “There are studies done about how people get dopamine hits even from feeling, for instance, the waffle pattern on the back of their phones; they’re addicted to the whole process of looking at their phones.”
By Jan Jekielek and Matt McGregor
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