‘Free speech.’ 

It’s the latest buzzword. The latest ‘get out of jail free’ card that fascists use to masquerade their hatred as ‘self-expression.’ What such people (see also: bigots) fail to realise, however, is what the definition of free speech actually is…

The right of a person to articulate opinions and ideas without interference or retaliation from the government.

Yet the people who most vehemently support free speech are technological giants such as Zuckerberg (owner of Meta which includes Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp) and Elon Musk (owner of X), both of whom are associates of the president of the United States (aka the most powerful man in the world), Donald Trump.

Their professed ‘free speech’ isn’t free at all when they are essentially being bribed by Trump.

At Trump’s inauguration, the front row seats were reserved for Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Meta), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and owner of Washington Post), Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Sam Altman (founder of OpenAI), Tim Cook (CEO of Apple), and Elon Musk (CEO of X).

In other words, the front-row seats were reserved for rich bootlickers, all of whom donated in their millions to Trump’s inauguration fund, some unexpectedly. 

The move to support Trump marked a shift for open AI’s Altman (pictured above) who has donated to Democratic candidates since 2013, as well as Bezos who, in 2016, publically announced his worry that Donald Trump would ‘erode’ American democracy, and also Zuckerberg given his past tensions with Trump…

In 2021, Meta banned Trump from its platforms following the Jan. 6 riots that saw him attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. In response, Trump accused Facebook of being biased against him, referring to it as ‘an enemy of the people.’ Zuckerberg was ‘plotting against him’, Trump argued, by ‘steering Facebook against his campaign.’ Trump consequently threatened Zuckerberg that if it happened again, he would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison.’

It was quite the transition then when in October 2024, Trump said that he liked the Meta CEO ‘much better now’, and, one month later, was dining with him in his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.

In the months since then, Zuckerberg has made major changes to Meta, most notably by removing its third-party fact-checking program.

‘We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate’, Zuckerberg said in a press release in January 2025.

What is Zuckerberg doing if not following the lead of Trump and his attack on ‘woke policies?’

And obviously, Elon Musk of X (formerly Twitter) is in on the game, too…

Musk spent $288 million to back Trump in the 2024 presidential election, despite claiming in March that ‘just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.’

After Trump’s victory, Musk was called in to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. He has since been at the forefront of American politics, with people questioning who is really in charge.

Joe Biden called it in the final speech of his presidency. He reiterated his fears about the ‘dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people’, cautioning that an emerging oligarchy threatened the foundations of US democracy.

‘Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, and our basic rights and freedoms’, Biden said.

If this amount of media control was emerging somewhere else, the same people who are cheering this on would be calling it tyranny.

While it’s true that we might not have the power of money, what we do have is the power of numbers. 

We all have the power, as a collective, to wake up from the matrix and see the world for what it is becoming. And that we must do…

Before it’s too late and the Trump-Musk regime undermines, not only democracy in the US, but also lays the foundation for undermining democracies around the world, we must all wake up.