But by now, most people hardly blink at these heavy-handed moves to control public speech. They are told that dissent is either misinformation or hate speech, and, in the midst of a pandemic, such freedoms are positively dangerous.

While this may please elites hoping to control the narrative and create hype or fear when the occasion calls for it, it has left most of the population without a voice or any point of reference on major public issues.

(Reddit and) All the other social media companies have done this as well: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google Pinterest, even the knitting community Ravelry. Each identify and muzzle the conservative members in their midst and enforce leftist conformity

As with Reddit, these sites also claim to make these decisions to eliminate hate speech, block misinformation, and protect victims. As with Reddit, conservative speech—the kind that opposes abortion and socialism and supports Trump and freedom—is always considered hateful and misinformed.

these sites serve billions of users and can sway public opinion far more than the established mainstream media ever did. They can bury evidence that conflicts with prevailing leftist narratives (as such, even researching this topic is unusually difficult). They can silence political campaigns, de-platform and denigrate any prominent conservative, and generate all kinds of societal crises, including the ongoing hysteria over Wuhan virus, in which the cure may soon prove more disastrous than the disease.

This renders conversations about politics, culture, and religion boring and predictable and encourage mindless technology bingeing. Thus, people become indifferent and passive, falling under the sway of big government and big business—more like the dystopias of Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451 than that of 1984.