The tech media giants started with easy high-profile targets, either genuine white supremacists, à la Red Ice, or sensationalist purveyors of American Exceptionalism and half-truths à la Infowars. They knew blocking these channels would only annoy a small subset of their customers. Few politicians would dare speak up in defence of these fringe outlets. Next, they targeted the likes of Stefan Molyneux, with nearly 1 million Youtube subscribers, former President Trump with over 50 million followers and last week the Corbett Report. I find this unsurprising, but also rather perverse. I never subscribed to Stefan Molyneux, but YouTube algorithms would keep suggesting his videos. Before I figured out how to disable auto-play, his videos would often follow other videos on the free speech theme by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad. I long suspected Stefan was controlled opposition. His philosophical videos targeted a huge reservoir of dissent among the disenfranchised working classes. If you were not paying attention, you may have dismissed the core precept of his belief system: the fundamental importance of genetics in determining intelligence and success, both within and between racial groups. Such opinions have been rather unfashionable in the public discourse since the end of WW2. However, it’s now becoming glaringly obvious that the elites have public and private opinions on many controversies. Superficially, they pretend to side with the people but behind the scenes, they work to sow the seeds of new divisions and prepare the public psyche for future policy shifts.

Now the likes of Twitter are targeting anyone who challenges the official covid narrative, even those of us with a modest following in the lower thousands responding to someone with fewer than 30 followers. It seems you may hurl all sorts of gratuitous insults and spout some of the wildest scientifically illiterate theories on Twitter, as long as you do not challenge narratives of strategic importance. I’ve read messages supportive of paedophilia. Indeed, one message contained a preview image of a pornographic scene involving a child. I blocked its sender immediately. I admit this represents a grey area in the debate on the bounds of free speech, but I always stress intellectual freedom rather than absolute freedom of expression. I’ve lost count of the number of flat earthers and moon landing deniers active on social media, but their accounts never seem to get blocked.

The usual excuse is to protect community guidelines. You may naïvely think this is just about good social etiquette in the digital space. Some may have worried that such guidelines prevented open debate on issues such as unsustainable migratory flows or the promotion of transgenderism in schools for fear of offending vocal lobbies or vulnerable individuals. Now the assault on free speech has extended to anyone critical of the biotech industrial complex. The covid scare has unmasked our ruling classes, who still hide behind the façade of saving lives. Big Pharma lobbyists have been very active for many decades. Since the advent of social media, they’ve employed people to counteract any claims they do not like. I recall a long thread about the massive over-prescription of antidepressants. This could potentially offend people dependent on such psychoactive meds. By the same warped logic vegans may not highlight the horrors of slaughterhouses for fear of offending meat eaters. Initially the thread involved genuine users with a range of views. The next morning, I received a deluge of unfavourable replies with all the hallmarks of professional copywriters and was stupid enough to waste valuable time interacting with someone who could almost immediately respond to any first-hand evidence I gave with peer-reviewed reports on the safety and benefits of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (such as Prozac). These people always claim to be mental healthcare professionals. None of these tweets were flagged as abusive. I first encountered the Twitter thought police in 2019 about a misinterpreted sarcastic reply with the trigger word “kill” I had forgotten about. My comment paraphrased someone’s illogical statement (Do you want us to kill ourselves?). I gladly deleted it to restore my access. Lesson learned: avoid certain trigger words unless you make the context abundantly clear. Now what kind of gratuitous offence could earn me a one-week suspension? Threatening to kill someone? Overt racism? Denying that anyone has ever died as a result of covid-19? Nope. I merely claimed that numerous trials have proven ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are safe and effective treatments for the kind of respiratory illnesses associated with sars-cov-2. Whom exactly is this offending? I can only suspect that my interlocutor, going by the handle of Justin Time, works for the social media monitoring arm of the biotech industrial complex. They want to suppress any suggestion that the new experimental gene-therapy injections, marketed as covid-19 vaccines, do more harm than good. If alternative treatments are proven to be safe and effective, then the new injections will lose their emergency use authorisation and the whole case for authoritarian bio-security measures, with its lockdowns, mandatory masking, antisocial policing and digital health certificates, collapses.