Slashing big tech's Gordian Knot

How to understand the deplatforming of Donald Trump

The Statue of Liberty.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

"Don't believe everything you read on the internet," we used to be told in elementary school when we took our turn in front of Netscape Navigator to travel Mr. Gore's Information Superhighway. A useful corollary would have been "Don't believe everything you read about the internet."

There is probably no subject in recent American history about which more nonsense has been talked. From its inception to the present, we have told ourselves that a communications technology that has destroyed the attention spans of billions, a surveillance tool that even the imaginary totalitarian dictators of Orwell and Huxley could never have dreamed of, a vast repository of pornography and terrorist correspondence, ennobled the human race. We have perpetuated myths of the hucksters and tinpot messiahs who made billions from it as Promethean fire-bringers rather than sordid tycoons. And, most foolishly of all, we have insisted that there is almost nothing that can be done to regulate it.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.