Recently, there’s been a controversy surrounding Facebook deleting posts mentioning the reporting surrounding an alleged whistleblower.
Let’s say that you were to post a link to an article in a mainstream news source (Heavy is a news aggregator generally considered credible) in which this whistleblower is named.
Bear in mind that at this point the whistleblower’s name has been mentioned publicly, with Twitter showing a broad range of references, including in transcripts from House testimony and on live broadcast television.
Now, it may be said that Eric Ciaramella is merely an alleged whistleblower, and potentially not the whistleblower. I think that this is an entirely legitimate argument.
But at which point do we decide to censor the media to protect individuals? We have seen kids wearing the wrong hats targeted by the media, or people raising money for charities who quoted questionable jokes from shows broadcast on media companies’ television channels on Twitter.
You can argue that there is a duty to protect whistleblowers, and I think that this is true. But this has not, by and large, been the rule. The establishment already knows the identity of this person. Their name has been tweeted by the son of the president.
There is a vested public interest in understanding the people involved in the impeachment investigation on both sides of the aisle. We want to know when the president has done something wrong. We pay for the government, and in its charter it is said to operate for the people. Those of us who would not sanction wrongdoing demand to know.
But we also demand to have due process. When it is stripped from one it will be stripped from all. We demand to be know when witnesses have conflicts of interest. We demand to know what our government is doing.
And now Facebook has become an Orwellian establishment.
Lowly proles cannot be trusted with a name. They might make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions. They might decide that the government is not of the people. They might challenge the power structures that be, and force bureaucrats and politicians to give up the control that they have.
So it is time for the memory hole.
Post-script: Lest I omit this information, the photograph I mocked up for this post is a verbatim replica of a post I made earlier today on my Facebook account. It has been deleted without notification to me.