This newfangled regime is a trickster hiding in our newsfeeds…watching us from every angle…
There is a barefaced scrubbing away happening before our very own eyes right now. With ghostly clicks, vanished posts, and the eerie silence by most of us in society, we are watching the disappearance of democracy.
Forget about hiding books before they are burnt, an unnecessary act seeing as how we have already given up our right to privacy. Whatever we do on their platform is theirs to behold.
Albeit, the erasing we learnt from the history books is already happening in Chicago with the cruelty of trump’s racism, with men in masks rappelling from Black hawks, with the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters, and the outright unlawful detention and killings of human beings. On the streets. As we watch.
Alongside these blatant acts is the new dictatorship. It is tidy.
This new dictatorship is tidy indeed. It hides in our newsfeeds watching us from every angle, anticipating our next move, concocting our desires even before we lift our fingers to place them on the keyboard.
The evil algorithm tricks us into believing we are the ones driving it. Then. It disappears us.
I watched it happen recently when a respected journalist posted a balanced reflection on the life and death of a public figure. It wasn’t a hate speech nor was it slanderous, like the malicious bots are trained to be.
It was measured, human, and morally complex: “Murder will never be right,” he wrote, “but it is not okay to whitewash a dead man’s crimes against humanity.”
Within hours, the post disappeared.
Three hundred people had read it, commented, engaged in something rare these days, an honest conversation.
Then it was gone, invisibile like air.
Not long after that, a neighbourhood Facebook group in Chicago – one built by ordinary citizens to help keep each other safe – was wiped off the platform too. Without explanation or a chance to appeal it was erased.
Just like how the rubbery top of a pencil scrubs away every trace of something that once existed, so was their chance at unity and safety.
Meta, the empire that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, claims these actions are about moderation, community safety, misinformation…What-Ever.
But here’s a question we have to ask ourselves…What is safety when truth is silenced, eh?
What is community when our connection is policed?
Meta stuffs us into its tiny molds, squishing all the outrage out of us. Meta chooses whose pain deserves empathy, and whose stories are too “sensitive” to share. Meta chooses how many dead hostages get attention and how many murdered children get none.
So, what’s left for us is a strange, synthetic democracy where we scroll and scroll, like and comment, where we believe we are participating in some greater good.
We believe our thoughts matter as we tap away and hit send triumphantly.
We believe we have freedom of speech on Facebook or Instagram.
WE tell ourselves what we write to each other on Whatsapp is private, you know? Afterall it is “encrypted”.
Laughable, really. Especially when we think of red boots, or mention a sick person and suddenly every ad is geared towards shoes stores and funeral parlours.
And especially-especially when we spend hours searching for that brilliant post we are so proud of because it doesn’t shout or scream or lie or steal, it is just heart wrenching truth.
We wondered if we posted it, what happened to it, did someone delete it?
Yes!
Yes, Meta did.
This is how censorship looks in the digital age…posts that focus on balanced conversations disappear, pages that question governments gets censored, and voices that unite us gets sucked into digital ether.
There is only-ever one voice that is amplified…the ones that divide,
Meta, for all its talk of community, is not a cool public square, it is not a place to lime and discuss life. It’s a succubus built on our emotions, where dissent is bad for business, but fear sells.
Meta has us so accustomed to deletion that we stopped noticing it. We accept the algorithm as truth, as real data that is fair and wise to all humankind.
Why? Because we believe real people like us drive the results.
The disappearance of one post, one group, one person is not really frightening, is it?
That’s precisely because the machinery of forgetting always begins as silently as a slithering snake…
…until one by one, we are choked out, swallowed up whole by a den of sibilant serpents.
If free speech lives only on platforms that can erase it, then we are not free. And if we do not defend the right to think, to speak, to disagree, we will wake up to find that even our silence, wilful or not, has been scripted for us.