Miguel Afonso Caetano on Nostr: "When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, ...
"When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).
Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt.
One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.)
Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again.
But what’s happening now is even more extreme and more terrifying. Something that even experts in democratic collapse didn’t see coming. Normally when democracies fall apart, there’s also a playbook. A series of predictable steps involving the military, or the courts, or sometimes both.
But what’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions."
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
#USA #FreeSpeech #Authoritarianism #Censorship #Trump #Democracy
This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).
Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt.
One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.)
Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again.
But what’s happening now is even more extreme and more terrifying. Something that even experts in democratic collapse didn’t see coming. Normally when democracies fall apart, there’s also a playbook. A series of predictable steps involving the military, or the courts, or sometimes both.
But what’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions."
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
#USA #FreeSpeech #Authoritarianism #Censorship #Trump #Democracy