Just a week before the 2020 election, I found myself on a Rocky Mountain slope glassing for mule deer. As the early sun reddened the land below white-topped mountains, I was beside a salt-of-the-earth guide in his early thirties. He works several blue-collar jobs and describes himself as politically conservative. But, like many, he is mostly politically agnostic, as he doesn’t have the time or interest to follow politics beyond what he sees on social media and in some brief encounters with cable news.
A few days before, the New York Post had run a smashing story on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” At the time, any link to the article was being blocked by Twitter and suppressed by other major social-media outlets. Twitter had even disabled the Post’s account. Meanwhile, 51 charlatans that the mainstream media were calling “intelligence experts” had signed an open letter insinuating the laptop was “Russian interference” in the election. This, as we now know, was a ruse to give the mainstream media cover to ignore the explosive story and, as it turned out, all the gun laws Hunter had broken.
I mentioned this laptop to my guide. He looked at me incredulously and said he hadn’t heard about it. I wasn’t surprised and so I carefully broke down the story. He looked at me even more skeptically. I became defensive and said he should check it out for himself, but that he’d have to go to the Post’s website, as social-media outlets were blocking distribution. He shrugged and said, “If that were true, I’d see it in my feeds.”
And, just like that, I knew the censorship from the tech giants and the mainstream media was winning. I sounded like a conspiracy nut talking about a “Russian disinformation” laptop from Joe Biden’s son—on the debate stage, Biden even got away with calling the story “utter garbage”—so I dropped the topic.
Now, here we are in 2024, and Twitter is X and is owned by Elon Musk who has made it an open platform. He fired 80% of Twitter’s staff. “Turns out you don’t need that many people to run Twitter,” said Musk. “If you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization, and you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people [it] turns out.”
So okay, in 2016, Trump used Twitter to directly communicate with voters and we know how that worked out. In 2020, Twitter and Facebook went deep into censorship and we also know what happened. Now in 2024, X is not censoring like Twitter did and Trump has started his own social-media platform, truthsocial.com. We don’t yet know how this will work out, but the ability to communicate with voters is necessary for any democracy.
This is especially true with topics related to the Second Amendment. The lived experience of America’s well-over 100 million law-abiding gun owners is completely different from how they are so often characterized by the mainstream media and the current administration.
Indeed, to directly suppress honest conversations among voters, in April of 2022, the Biden administration announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board to work with Big Tech to suppress speech. Their stated goal was to combat misinformation (false information), mal-information (factual information that could be used in ways an administration might not like) and disinformation (deliberately misleading or biased information). The notion that government should be put in charge of what is true was so unpalatable and problematic to a mostly free people that a massive public outcry (led by the political Right) resulted in the board being disbanded in August of 2022.
