1984-2021

To the Editor:

Big Brother isn’t who you think. It is not the government: It’s social media. The leaders of Germany, France, and Australia issued cautions about removing Pres. Donald Trump from Twitter.

They are concerned that censorship of any world leader is inadvisable because it infringes on the rights of free speech.

I disagree … for now. We will let Angela Merkel deal with, and worry about Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, but we will do everything in our power to stop the forces of sedition in the U.S.

Yes, I do admit that we are walking a fine line pulling the plug on Trump, but we aren’t the ones who are doing it. It’s Big Brother Twitter, Big Brother Facebook and the Big Brothers in Parler and other social media organizations.

They are the ones deciding what will and what will not be included. They are the new grand, all-seeing, information czars.

When we agree with their policies, such as banning Trump’s call to insurrection, it seems right and proper. But if Twitter decided to block Bernie Sanders from talking about socialism, or Al Gore from talking about the environment, we would be outraged.

Who is editing the editors? They answer to no one.

For good or ill, it’s now painfully easy to stir up an entire country. Several hundred thousand yahoos (even if they are only 1 percent of our population) have been texting back and forth about armed, violent protests in our states’ capitols and in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 20.

Yes, Twitter can also be used to martial people in a positive and beneficial way, but who is to decide what posts are acceptable or unacceptable?

Back only a few decades, when all we had were newspapers and telephones, it would have been almost impossible to organize treachery on such a large scale. In a limited way, the media was the message.

Now social media is the monster.

We may be looking at the beginning of government controls on all platforms. Right now they are self-policing. But it depends on the political and social philosophies of their CEOs.

This is way too much control by too few people on what Americans should be thinking.

This is a difficult question: Should the internet (and social media) be completely free from constraints? Should we continue to allow opioid and firearm sales, child pornography, and all manner of illegal and immoral activity on the dark web? Who will write the political and moral codes of conduct, and who will police them?

Welcome to the brave new world of half-truths, psychological manipulation, and indoctrination.

Joe Randazzo

South Burlington