Matt Taibbi: State censorship is a fact in most of the West.

"Two years ago, I was invited by Elon Musk to look at internal correspondence on Twitter.
And this led to a series of stories called the Twitter Files, whose main revelation was a broad government effort to suppress speech. I was invited here to talk about risks to the First Amendment, but to spare the suspense, that battle is already lost. State censorship is a fact in most of the West. In February, our European allies began observing the Digital Services Act, which requires internet platforms to enforce judgment of state-appointed content reviewers with the Orwellian name Trusted Flaggers. Everything that we found in the Twitter files can be reduced to one sentence. An alphabet soup of US government federal agencies, informally, is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe's horrible draconian new law.
Is it against the law when a White House official calls Facebook and this happened and asked to ban a journalist for writing that the COVID vaccine doesn't stop infection or transmission? I think, hell yes, it certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, even if you can find judges will say it doesn't violate the letter. But this is post 9-11 America, whether it's about surveillance or torture or habeas corpus or secret prisons or rendition or any of a dozen other we ignore laws. Institutional impunity is the chief characteristic of our current form of government. We have concepts like illegal but necessary. The government can torture, of course the public can't, that's probably good. The state can intercept phone calls, you can't. The state can search without warrants, they can assassinate, snatch your geo locations from your cell phone, you require that officials have special permission to ignore laws when they feel like it. Ten years ago, we were caught spying on three different French presidents, as well as companies like BNP, Paribas, Credit Agri-Cole, Peugeot, Renault, and Total. Barack Obama called the French to apologize, but did we stop? No. But we did indict the person who released the news, Julian Assange. By the way, congratulations to Julian for getting out. Finally."