The current trend to deploy false, distorted, selective, and deliberately misleading information in pursuit of various objectives may be a more troubling contagion than COVID-19. We see it in traditional media with “journalists” who now view their role as the promotion of narratives rather than the objective account of facts. Big Tech now imposes its ideologies on vast swaths of America while answering only to executives, principal shareholders, and employees.

For example, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon inflicted a digital death sentence on the social media application Parler by withholding the infrastructure and linkages on which Parler depended, a practice known as “deplatforming.” In other cases, malleable terms of service agreements provide an excuse for selective censorship, deplatforming, or manipulation of the search ranking algorithms effectively to bury content. This was blatant during the election, as legitimate stories about Hunter Biden were buried. And Amazon (i.e., Jeff Bezos) removes books it alone finds objectionable, such as Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, which is about transgender issues. Bezos can even deploy his wholly owned mouthpiece, the Washington Post, in support.