What Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg owe to the mainstream media

Censorship and the silencing of dissenting voices has been a defining feature of the 21^st century. It’s curious, because it wasn’t meant to be like this. This epoch, as the tech libertarian utopians of the 1990s so eagerly pronounced, was going to be one of unprecedented and untrammelled freedom. The internet, which burst into public consciousness back then, promised as much. Social media, which erupted a decade later, promised even more. And then it all went wrong.

We shouldn’t have been surprised. Ideologies based on utopian fantasies, underpinned by the illusion that mankind can be perfected, inevitably descend into authoritarianism. Online debate and social media became policed and muzzled, a medium through which liberal orthodoxies and then a hyper-liberal woke creed was imposed and enforced, abetted by mobs who sought to punish dissenters and heretics. Facebook and Twitter became places where you spoke freely at your peril about race, gender, immigration and Covid vaccines.