When Elon Musk bought X, formerly Twitter, and refused to comply with the global censorship regime, he became a target overnight — especially for European Union bureaucrats determined to reassert control over online speech. The EU’s latest effort to slap X with a $140 million penalty is just the most recent example of that campaign.
The EU claims the fine is due to X allowing users to purchase verification checkmarks without the platform independently confirming their identities.
Americans understand that anonymous speech is a cornerstone of liberty. From the Federalist Papers onwards, anonymity has protected dissent, whistleblowers, and political minorities. But Europe does not afford such freedom. That’s why Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced the EU’s X fine, suggesting it is retaliation for Musk’s refusal to censor speech at the EU’s direction.
In 2023, the EU opened an investigation into the company for “disinformation,” and Musk drew the ire of European regulators for refusing to remove an interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump from his platform.
Musk is, of course, an outlier in the tech world. Most of his peers in the industry genuflect to the demands of various governments and are willing to restrict disfavored views.
The House Judiciary Committee formally detailed the relationship between tech giants and the Biden administration, which repeatedly demanded that Americans’ views be taken offline. According to the committee, it suppressed or took down the views of doctors, scientists, and commentators who did not align with the government narrative that COVID originated from a pangolin sold at a wet market in China — not a laboratory in Wuhan. From shifting search results to “fact-checkers” that tech companies employed to discredit skeptics, Big Tech and its market dominance played a critical role in censoring Americans.
This is the real lesson of the last five years: the power to decide what billions of people see is the ultimate form of control.
That is one of the reasons President Trump expressed concern about Netflix potentially gaining control of one of its most prominent rivals, Warner Bros. Discovery — the company that owns HBO Max and the entire HBO catalog.
If Big Tech showed us anything over the last five years, it’s how ruthlessly willing it is to silence, throttle, and bury any story, voice, or idea that threatens the approved narrative, even when those ideas later turn out to be true. Now imagine that same censorship strength, only this time it’s not coming from a search engine or a social platform you can (in theory) walk away from. It’s coming from inside your television.
Netflix already has 301 million subscribers, and the merger will create a 400 million-subscriber base, making Netflix the most powerful cultural ministry the world has ever seen. What Silicon Valley did to information with algorithms and shadow-bans, this new mega-studio will do to imagination itself — quietly, seamlessly, and with a smile from the next autoplay.
If Big Tech taught us how easy it is to kill a story, a merged Netflix–Warner will teach us how easy it is to destroy an entire worldview, one canceled series, one “content moderation” decision, one algorithm tweak at a time. And this time, there will be almost nowhere left to escape.
Netflix has built an empire on content that consistently promotes left-wing ideologies, striking multi-million dollar deals with Barack and Michelle Obama to produce politically charged documentaries and making multimillion-dollar investments in films spotlighting progressive figures, such as the $10 million acquisition of “Knock Down the House,” which celebrates socialist firebrand Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other insurgent socialist Democrats.
Critics such as film reviewer Armond White have characterized the platform as a “propaganda machine” for its relentless promotion of social justice narratives. White termed the marriage between Netflix and the Obamas as the creation of a new Ministry of Propaganda. That Ministry will expand exponentially should this deal be consummated and approved by the government.
Where Big Tech once limited speech with bans and shadow banning, this new giant will regulate thought itself: deciding which histories are retold, which heroes are celebrated, and which taboos are normalized for the next generation.
Michael Glassner, the President of C&M Transcontinental LLC, served as Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Campaign Manager for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and was a Senior Advisor on the 2024 campaign. He is one of the longest serving executives in modern presidential campaign history and has had senior roles in seven presidential campaigns.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: CitizenGO, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
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