If truth reigned supreme, and media platforms could do little to sway us from seeing reality clearly, the richest people on the planet would not be investing their money in buying their own bit of real estate in the media landscape.
But then again, if we could all see reality clearly - unclouded by corporate media interference - there wouldn't be any billionaires. We would have understood that their extreme wealth was too much of a threat to be allowed, that their fortunes could too easily be turned against us, buying our politicians and turning our democracies into increasingly hollow shells, stripped of the good things we intended.
If billionaires weren't making fortunes from weapons sales, we surely wouldn't be endlessly cheering on wars.
If billionaires didn't demand the right to buy politicians, we might be more ready to address our dysfunctional political and media systems.
If billionaires weren't profiting from the destruction of the natural world, we might be having a more realistic conversation about the impending extinction of our species.
Censorship as panacea
But, unable to maintain their attention on the structural deformations caused by the rule of the billionaires, left-liberals like Monbiot and Chakrabortty keep deflecting to the cause of censorship. They speak of unspecified "curbs" and approve of blocking "Russian news sources" as though this is the panacea for society's ills.
The point they have obscured is that misinformation spread by Twitter users pales in comparison to the disinformation that constantly batters us from corporate news outlets, like The Guardian newspaper they work for. (Disinformation is misinformation with deception or manipulation as its intent.)
Disinformation such as making us believe that the West's many illegal wars of aggression, like the one against Iraq, were defensive, or mistakes, or to promote democracy. Or that such illegal wars cannot be compared to the wars of aggression committed by "enemy" states.
Disinformation such as persuading us that we have Trump-voting "deplorables" because of social media "fake news" rather than growing disenchantment with liberal political systems in thrall to billionaires - systems that serve the super-rich while imposing austerity on the rest of us.
Disinformation that for decades has allowed climate denial lobbies - secretly but handsomely funded by billionaires - to conceal from us the findings of the billionaires' own scientists, which show we are hurtling towards a climate breakdown tipping point.
And the continuing disinformation that makes us believe the Green New Deals we have been offered are designed to save us, rather than the billionaires' profits, from extinction.
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