The revelations made by the left leaning Intercept magazine about collusion between Big Tech and America’s security agencies and ongoing allegations from numerous sources about the censoring of information that might be harmful to the Democrats, is likely to end up as a much bigger story than it is currently being treated as by the mainstream and legacy media. I suspect that this story will bubble around in alternative media and in media that is aligned to both the Left and the Right in a partisan way before it bursts like a firework into the public’s consciousness.

Just as the Watergate scandal bubbled around on the inside pages of the newspapers and was only of initial interest to political anoraks, so also will the current revelations and allegations surrounding Big Tech and their contacts with and work for the US government. When the story does finally break into the view of the wider public this story is going to be huge.

This is what one British magazine, Spiked, is saying about this increasingly worrying affair. They say that it ‘lifts the lid’ on collusion between US Government agencies and various tech platforms and the rather too cozy relationship between the two. The agencies have been working with Big Tech to clamp down on what they call ‘misinformation’ but it is likely to be that what is termed misinformation is more likely to be inconvenient opinions that the government doesn’t like.

Spiked said:

(The Intercept article)…explodes the notion that Facebook or Twitter clamping down on dissent is just a case of private companies imposing their own content policies purely of their own volition. Rather, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have played an active role, according to the piece, in shaping platforms’ speech policies and getting troublesome posts removed.

The report details close working relationships, regular meetings, even dedicated portals allowing officials to flag certain accounts, between the American security state and the bigwigs of Silicon Valley. Anyone who cares about freedom of speech should read it.

Those who read both the Spiked and the Intercept articles when they think about collusion and partisanship in both the US government agencies concerned and those who own and run Big Tech are bound to think about the Hunter Biden laptop affair. For those who do not know about this incident, shortly before the last US Presidential election in 2020, the New York Post came into possession of information, allegedly from the laptop of Joe Biden’s son Hunter, that would be damaging to both Hunter and Joe Biden. When the Post tried to publicise this information, which was in the course of a genuine journalistic endeavor, they found that they could not do so on Twitter. Twitter had suppressed the Hunter Biden story and this led to much speculation as to whether the story had been suppressed in order to help the Biden campaign against Donald Trump.

This is a much bigger story than it might look at first. What we have alleged here is that various US government agencies have suppressing legitimate speech which is bound to be seen by many as contravening the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It will also raise questions as to how impartial the agencies are if the suppressed information ended up helping one particular political party, in this case the Democrats.

I need to say at this point that there is nothing wrong in my view with a government putting their own point of view out there, especially if it is to challenge something that is patently and obviously false, such as the claim that 5G cellphone towers cause disease. There is also nothing untoward about a government monitoring the internet for evidence of genuine terrorist activity. However it’s one thing to put out information that challenges nutcase theories or track potential terrorists and quite another to act to suppress speech that is legal under the US Constitution.

I reckon the mainstream legacy media might be able to hold off from speaking of this story until after the Mid Term Elections in the USA but this story is likely to break out after that in a big way. Although some of what is being talked out in the reports went on during the Presidency of Donald Trump, the Biden administration is becoming more closely linked to campaigns against what is termed ‘misinformation’ with the Biden government even appointing a ‘misinformation czar’. Whilst it is right that any Trump involvement in speech suppression or attacks on free speech created by collusion between tech companies and US government agencies should be criticised, it needs to be pointed out that not only has Biden not dismantled any of the schemes to suppress so-called misinformation. On the contrary they’ve ramped up these schemes. When this story breaks into the public’s mind it could be massive. It might end up being Biden’s Watergate or something similar. We have to wait and see how this story pans out over the coming months.