Forbidden Thoughts

In 2017, Congress demanded that the leaders of the three most popular social media companies, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, plus the most popular search engine, Google. present themselves to Congress for a scolding and demands for censorship.

Although the 1996 Telecommunications Act treated social media platforms as providers, not publishers, thereby protecting them from lawsuits for what citizens said on their platforms, Congress insisted that the ability of citizens to communicate with each other horizontally instead of receiving information top down from media companies, beamed individually into each house, car or phone, made it harder to control the narrative. If citizens were allowed to communicate with other people in their country and around the world, they could check facts, give reactions and share opinions.

How can a ruling class rule properly when citizens can think and speak freely among themselves? That is downright "undemocratic" as Congress members put it, so self unaware that they didn't realize how Orwellian they seemed to citizens who can think. You can't have a democracy without free speech and open debate, contrary to what our elected officials assert.

The CEOs of the corporations, offered a choice between a carpet of gold or a carpet leading to destitution and prison, turned their companies over to such entities as the Atlantic Council.

A new Thought Crime court was rolled out and the term "community standards" was introduced. Community standards are not defined and appear arbritary, with people being silenced for any dissent from Establishment pronouncements, or for using proper English pronouns, and even for sharing mainstream media articles deemed "hateful". Hate, like community standards, seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Citizens were forced to stop communicating freely and to start guessing what words or thoughts might trigger the all-seeing algorithms.

"Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them."

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” Emanuel Goldstein