via hotair:
The real crisis didn’t come from professionalization. It came from Big Tech platforms, which first partnered with bloggers and independent voices — and then worked to curtail or even silence them. The first iteration of this came with Facebook, whose vast audience attracted many independents and some corporate bloggers to commit to that platform, only to see the rules and requirements change in ways that dried up revenue.
The last few years have been even worse, however, as all of the Big Tech platforms have participated in speech policing. To be fair, Congress began driving them into those practices after the Russia-collusion hysteria of 2016. And to be even more fair, Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey initially resisted those calls, but got beaten down by the unrelenting pressure and threats to regulate the platforms. Now we know the extent of the interventions by the CDC, HHS, the FBI, and other government agencies, but we only know that because Elon Musk bought Twitter and published all the correspondence — and the FTC is now targeting Twitter/X.