Whether mass vaccination was the only way out of the pandemic or not, behaviourally nudging citizens to guilt each other into taking a novel treatment was not the way a civilised society should have acted.

As demonstrated by Fisman, et al., public health models in the hands of the wrong people can result in devastatingly harmful and brutally misleading public messaging. This, in turn, could lead to the introduction of inappropriate health policies.

Mind control is an important aspect of any democratic society. Indeed, Bernays maintains that without the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses”, democracy simply would not “work”.

The more you give politicians the power to regulate information, the more they will use that power to do only rational thing: use that power to preserve their leadership positions. While Democrats may think this will help them, very likely, the shoe will be on the other foot quickly and it will be used against them.

Ellsberg: The rationale that US and Russian leaders use when sabre-rattling is clear: the threat of nuclear war justifies obscene military spending and lines the pockets of arms dealers in both countries.

The deeper battle over Twitter isn’t about free speech at all. That ship has long since sailed. Rather, it’s a fight for control of a key crucible of political consensus-formation, between those who prefer power to be vested in named individuals, and those who prefer to be ruled by self-organising swarm.

When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech’s centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.

“Data was very easily used by influencers and decision-makers to fit particular narratives,” Norman Fenton, Ph.D., a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London, said in an interview on “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”