Hail the new ministry of truth: Big Tech

Yet again, fact is stranger than fiction, as more and more parallels between Big tech and the Ministry of Truth abound. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, Zuck, and Sundar Pichai were all summoned in front of Congress for another hearing (Twitter and Facebook both decided that the laptop from hell had to be memory holed; hidden from the collective consciousness of America as we entered the election).

Today, we’re still having a debate, as to whether big tech is censoring, influencing, hampering free speech, etc. when it’s obvious that this is happening. Twitter got caught redhanded censoring a critical piece of information from a legitimate news source, at a critical moment in time; a development that would certainly have had a bearing on the election.

The currents situation is reminiscent of 1984: in the dystopian society depicted, there were several ministries in government, one of them is the Ministry of Truth. (Of course, this is a complete misnomer because in reality it serves as the opposite: it is responsible for the falsification of events. They doctored the historical records to show a government-approved version of events).

In actual fact, a sort of Ministry of Truth has actually long ago existed: In 1912, the Soviet newspaper industry created Pravda (which literally means truth). It did not start as a political publication, in fact it was a journal on social life. But Lenin decided that the party needed a voice in the news industry and that Pravda could convey the party line to the people. Again, Pravda had little to do with truth, but it was literally called the truth, in a perfectly Orwellian fashion. 

The Soviet Newspapers were were staffed by journalists who were undereducated and they lacked journalistic skill (in other words, exactly like today). The Soviet Press Corps did strive to raise the standards of the press, but also, had to maintain strong party support from the journalists — which proved an impossible juxtaposition.

Finally, in the 1930s, the Institute of Journalism threw in the towel, ended its drive for professional journalism and standards, threw out the existing key figures, and government officials revised the entire curriculum to just meet their propaganda goals.

We are at that stage of throwing principles to the wind today. Look at how journalists and the news media behaves, for instance in how they censor uncomfortable stories concerning Hunter Biden, or more recently, how they called Joe Biden as the early winner in several key states (while sitting on Trump’s wins that were even more obvious).

Over a 100 years old, Pravda is still alive to this day, still led by pro-Kremlin editors — but it’s of course but a shadow of its former self. It’s now effectively a tabloid, as that’s what they’ve had to resort to to cling on to some sort of readership. The same thing is happening to the legacy news media in the west. It’s getting ever click-battier and tabloid-like, by the day, while getting further and further away from any semblance of journalism. Looks like history is repeating.

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