‘Silicon Valley bureaucrats deciding who gets freedom of speech’: Jimmy Dore on Facebook censorship

The US government tries to control political narratives on social media, encouraging Silicon Valley giants’ censorship in exchange for good graces, a top US social commenter said, after Facebook closed some RT-linked pages.

“The ultimate goal of all this Russiagating that is happening in the United States is to expand the security state’s control over social media,” popular social and political commenter –and stand-up comedian– Jimmy Dore told RT, after Facebook unexpectedly suspended pages belonging to Maffick Media – a company 51 percent owned by RT’s video agency Ruptly.

“They are working in conjunction with the state, with the government,” Dore speculated, noting that the banned RT- linked content did not violate any of the rules of the platform, despite Facebook’s claim that the blocked pages failed to disclose their funding. Dore believes that Mark Zuckerberg’s company has overstepped a line when it comes to censorship.

“This is a bunch of bureaucrats in the Silicon Valley deciding who gets freedom of speech based on completely random rules that aren’t public and they make up on the fly,” Dore said. “If you’re going to take someone's ‘rights’ you have to have a transparent process to do that.”

Furthermore, Dore believes that most Americans remain uninformed about Facebook’s shady practices, because the issue of social media censorship is not being reported fairly in the United States, simply because “the corporate media is in bed with the same people.”

The political commenter recalled how, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, competing for the Democrats’ nomination against Hillary Clinton, was ignored by the mass media despite having a strong support base from the online community. At about the same time the Russiagate scandal was born amid unsubstantiated accusations that Russian operatives used social media to disseminate content to sway the race. Now the government has turned to censorship of social media platforms who, Dore argues, are more than happy to oblige.

“One of the reasons Facebook is so eager to censor at the behest of the government and government organizations, and organizations like the Atlantic Council... is because they don’t want to be regulated,” the commenter explained.

“They are controlling the narrative in our country and in our culture, and they need to be regulated like a utility that they are!”

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