The War for the Free Internet

What internet censorship will look like a year from now

The year is 2025. The narrative is settled. We know why Trump won in 2024. He won because of media. He won because of free, uncensored media. He won because whatever efforts were made to fortify social media and podcasts and X and AI, it wasn’t enough. 

Liberals complain about this. They started the night after Trump won. They started long before Trump won. Conservatives, too, have accepted it. They celebrate heroes like Elon and Rogan. They celebrated them leading up to the election, on election night, and as Trump was sworn in. 

This time, technology escaped censorship. Technology escaped regulation. Regulation meant to confine, shape, and procedurally mandate a foregone media monopoly. They tried hard to censor social media, search results, and AI. This was well documented by Jacob Siegel on multiple conclusions when it came to social media. And by myself when it came to AI. 

When detectives look for a crime, they ask for a means and motive. The means is there. The means is directled agency coordination with social media and AI companies, as well as indirect pressure through state-funded NGOs. The same tools that were available for agencies, NGOs, and corporations to censor speech have not changed one bit. 

As for the motive, it's more mixed. The internal party narratives before every election are a choose-your-own-adventure story. Media spun tons of different narratives and many of them favored Harris. Democrats were confident. They were busy dealing with their own problems: Joe Biden, the swap, the campaign, and managing their own media appearances. So while they had a longstanding motive to censor new media, it was only a secondary concern.

Remind you of anything? History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. After the Trump election, the narrative rapidly congealed, shifting into a paranoid mess about Russia and Facebook. And whatever you think of the truth of those narratives, their propaganda value was clear. They united what their own activists call a whole of society approach, a totalitarian approach to align NGOs, activists, government agencies, and corporations to collectively censor Trump in 2020. 

The year is 2025. That narrative has once again settled. They have done the same thing in 2016 and are arming up for another war for the whole of society. And this time, the whole of society is not just targeting broadcast and social media. It’s AI, it’s podcasts, it’s all of Elon Musk’s companies, and they will weaponize agencies, NGOs, state governments, foreign governments, alike. I know this because the exact same means that they have already used are still available, and their motives are only becoming stronger. 

But something is different. Like in 2016, Trump won the election. Unlike in 2016, the people around him are ready. When the whole of society totalitarians try to creep forward, Trump and Elon are waiting in the trenches.