On October 5, Ryan McMaken’s article “Police Officers Threaten to Quit If the Public Keeps Demanding Accountability” managed to hit the top spot on Reddit. It was soon removed from the popular social media platform under very suspicious circumstances.
For those not familiar with Reddit, the platform consists of “subreddits” based on a particular topic or theme. The best performing posts within a subreddit are then highlighted on the front page. In this case, the subreddit was one titled Not the Onion, which features “true stories that are so mind-blowingly ridiculous that you could have sworn they were from The Onion.” The headline to Ryan’s article seemed like a natural fit; users of the subreddit agreed, but the thought police of Reddit disagreed.
Despite Reddit’s actions against the article, the piece managed over a hundred thousand views.
Read more: The Social Media Purge: Is the Mises Institute Next?
Unfortunately, Reddit hasn’t been the only Big Tech actor seemingly interested in downplaying Mises Institute content. In recent weeks, Google has made changes to its search engine that makes Mises Institute articles harder to find. This seems particularly true for articles on Big Tech and social media. The content itself doesn’t seem to be the issue—links to websites that republished our articles still appear on the front page—but the mises.org link has been buried.
While disappointing, none of this is surprising. The ideas of the Mises Institute are particularly dangerous to would-be central planners of all kinds. While social media and Big Tech have been useful tools in the promotion of our ideas, we have long understood the dangers of relying upon these platforms for distribution.
In the words of our founder, Lew Rockwell, “we don’t beg for scraps from the imperial table, and we don’t seek a seat at that table. We want to knock the table over.”
To those ends, we have actively worked to improve our internal email lists and search engine. We are lucky that a large portion of our frequent user base visits our site directly, which is the surest way to avoid the censorship of third parties. We also have backups of our online video library on censor-resistant platforms, such as Bitchute.
Read more: Notes on Trump’s Executive Order for Tech Companies
No matter how the landscape of future politics and power unfolds in America, the ideas of the Mises Institute will not be silenced so long as there are those interested in finding the truth.
If you believe in these ideas, please consider becoming a Mises Institute member for just $5 a month at Mises.org/censor.
