Mike Benz

There's been congressional pressure.

There has been the prying open of Twitter, which is the X. It's the largest political thought incubator of all the social media platforms because everyone's a content producer on there, unlike YouTube, as soon as you hit the retweet button.

And that has also given cover to folks like Mark Zuckerberg to lessen censorship capacity.

at Facebook and on Instagram.

And this is one of the things the censorship industry has been apoplectic about, is that they accused Mark Zuckerberg of riding Elon Musk's free speech coattails and removing a lot of the liaison tentacles that previously were back-channeled by U.S.

intelligence or by

political operatives involved in the censorship industry.

And so the internet now is much freer than it was several years ago in the U.S.

So the blob has a new strategy involving bringing international pressure on the platforms as well as state pressure within individual states in the U.S.

Wow.

So we did get some wins.

We're winning at the level the battle was being fought from 2016 to 2020.

If we had then what we have now,

we'd be in a totally different world.

The issue is, is as we're winning at the current level, they've moved the battle upstream to things that are existentially much more terrifying.

Just straight up international laws banning First Amendment speech.

We're seeing this with this new EU censorship law, the Digital Services Act, which adds a disinformation compliance component.

And that forces X to censor anything NATO wants to censor,

or else they lose their European market, which is a larger market than their U.S.

market.