Meta, the corporate parent of Facebook, has announced its plans to control the flow of information on the site where most voters get their news. You see, the public has to be protected from “misinformation” and the omniscient sages of Meta are just the folks to decude what is and isn’t worthy of being shared with the public. Nick Clegg, Meta’s “President, Global Affairs, offers these takeaways from a longer essay:

Takeaways

• Our approach to the 2022 US midterm elections is consistent with the policies and safeguards we had in place during the 2020 US presidential election.
• We have hundreds of people across more than 40 teams working on the midterms, and we spent approximately $5 billion globally on safety and security last year alone. 
• We’re focused on preventing voter interference, connecting people with reliable information and providing industry-leading transparency for ads about social issues, elections and politics.

Never forget that Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, provided more than $400 million in 2020 to pay election officials and hype get out the vote measures in heavily Democrat areas.

Writing in the Western Journal via The Federalist Papers,  Jack Davis notes:

[Clegg’s] post cites one side of the forces allegedly trying to disrupt an election by noting that Meta has “banned more than 270 white supremacist organizations, and removed 2.5 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally on Facebook in the first quarter of 2022.”

No specific mention was made about Facebook banning content from left-wing groups or their activities.

Paiten Iselin of Newsbusters notes that the Biden administration may be invokved in the censorship:

Notably, Meta’s 2022 midterm elections policy indicated that government may even collude with the platform in censoring content. “We’re working with federal government partners including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as local and state election officials and industry peers, to make sure we’re all preparing for different scenarios,” the policy noted.

 And don’t worry that Twitter will be allowing all viewpoints to be expressed:

Twitter also got on the censorship bandwagon again. It announced Thursday that it will begin enforcing its Civic Integrity Policy ahead of the U.S. 2022 midterm elections.

Twitter claimed in a tweet thread that its policy will target “misleading claims about the voting process, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, or misleading claims that may undermine public confidence in elections outcomes.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">“Two of the leading platforms responsible for censoring the New York Post‘s bombshell Hunter Biden scandal stories before the 2020...election are gearing up to censor free speech to combat so-called ‘misinformation’ ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.”<a href="https://t.co/WyoJ7AjUsy">https://t.co/WyoJ7AjUsy</a></p>&mdash; Internet Accountability Project (IAP) (@The_IAP) <a href="https://twitter.com/The_IAP/status/1559995227527454720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 17, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I am so old that I remember when the free flow of information was regarded as key to the democratic process. But the ruling interests in the United States have decided otherwise, and as long as people default to using Facebook and Twitter for their communications, they will be sheep, herded by the oligarchs.