Winifred Mitchell Baker, the executive chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, says that deplatforming President Donald Trump “isn’t enough” and has made suggestions for social media and other platforms to crack down on the entire conservative movement.
“There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6,” Baker writes in a company blog post. “Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?”
“But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality,” she claims. “Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.”
Baker argues that “temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms” isn’t enough, and suggests the following actions be taken:
Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
In other words, Baker is calling for an all-out assault against Trump and his supporters in the name of “transparency.” President Trump has endured bogus allegations of racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, etc., etc. for years, now, the Left is unified in claiming Trump “incited” an “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, and is using that bogus claim as a pretext for Orwellian measures to silence Trump and his supporters, as well as efforts to identify, harass, and demonetize those they see as his enablers.
Does this sound familiar to you? I can’t decide whether this is like Oceania in 1984 or Germany in 1933. The Left, with the help of the mainstream media, Hollywood, and Big Tech, has waged a propaganda campaign designed to demonize the political Right, and thus justify the erosion of their freedoms. According to the radical Left, conservatives have no right to be heard and no right to make a living.
In other news, I’ve deleted Firefox, a browser created by Mozilla, from my computer.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis