You are, perhaps, sick of reading about social media, Twitter, Parler, Zingerola, Futli, crackdowns on expression, deplatforming, and all the other stories about the Internet and the First Amendment. Perhaps that’s what all the tech giants want: weariness and confusion, ending in boredom and rote acceptance. But before we roll over and submit, we need to figure out whether we’re dealing with purposeful malevolence or good ol’-fashioned human clusterbuggery.

The older you get, the more money you put on the clusterbugs.

But what if the crackdown was organized well in advance? What if all the important players met in a mountain lair in the Alps years ago and presented their plans to George Soros, who was wearing a gray Nehru jacket and stroking a white cat with profuse fur?

At this point some people are rolling their eyes: That’s ridiculous. Alpine lair. Idiot. It was an underwater base in the Caribbean, accessible by elevator from Epstein’s private island.

The plan was activated after Trump’s remarks, before the Capitol was overrun. Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, grabbed the red phone with no dial; Twitter Jack answered, and Bezos barked, “Initiate Operation Hushimup.” Jack nodded, strode to the wall safe, pulled out a sheaf of papers, found the proper code, and entered the numbers in a transmitter hidden in his shoe. Then Donald Trump’s phone leapt in his hands and went black.

Could’ve happened like that. Or, knowing what we know about human beings, it could have worked like this: Everyone who had spent the last four years in a quivering state of outrage had a full-body spasmodic reaction to events and started shutting things down because the other guys were and they didn’t want to seem like they approved. After all, if Amazon is cutting off access to its servers because it’s fighting Nazis, then anyone who doesn’t follow suit is assumed to be goose-stepping around the home office singing the Horst Wessel song at the top of their lungs.

I think the latter’s more likely. One of the calls for Amazon to do something! now! came from a Twitter account called “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.” This is the sort of group that strikes dread into a woke boss’s heart. It’s bad enough to be criticized by a group that wants Justice, but when they add Climate to it, the quantity of moral authority doubles. If Amazon Non-Binary Employees for Social Climate Equity Justice had applied pressure, the company would have razed the server farm where Parler was hosted and salted the land, just to ensure that no infected bytes would rise again.

Parler might have taken down the posts that violated its terms of service and avoided some trouble. But Twitter and Facebook are guilty of the same crimes. Consider Kathy Griffin, described by some charitable people as a comedian. In 2017 she tweeted out a picture of herself holding forth the severed, bloody head of Donald Trump.

Imagine Jack Benny, with his trademark expression of slight offense, holding a severed head of Truman. Well! Imagine Charlie Chaplin doing a deft pantomime routine with the flayed skull of Coolidge. Now forget I just compared Griffin to either one. Thank you.

This act of resistance — stunning! brave! — did not have the salutary effect on Griffin’s career she might have en­visioned. After a day she expressed rote regret and took down the picture. Well, as of this writing, it’s back. She reposted the ghastly image. The Hill reported about it in November. It’s no secret. Twitter lets it stay up, and hence one can only conclude: Twitter approves.

Perhaps they would say the image refers to classical paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes, a biblical story that provided endless inspiration for you-go-girl canvases in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. If that’s the case, then photoshops of Joe Biden as Saint Sebastian, bound and pierced by a dozen arrows, looking up to heaven as if to say, “C’mon, God” — that’s fine?

We’ll find out.

Twitter also runs sponsored tweets from the Chinese government. They tell us how Uyghur women are now liberated from old gender roles and consequently live lives of happy fulfillment. If one replies to the tweet by saying, “This is an odd definition of being starved in a rape camp in between twelve-hour shifts making Nike shoes,” Twitter might well add a warning: “This claim has not been verified by the nice lobbyist from Nike who took us all out to lunch at that vegan place where all the tables are made from reclaimed wood and the owner is committed to hiring 40% LGBTQ+ BIPOC.”

To be fair, Twitter notes that the tweets are from an official Chinese-government account. Why? So we can judge the message for ourselves? Okay, well, sounds nice in practice, but if people judge incorrectly, they will not be Safe and may experience Harm. Everyone must be wrapped in lanolin-lathered bubble wrap with public posturing, hence the festival of deplatforming.

Note: Zingerola and Futli, mentioned at the top of this piece, do not exist. But if anyone makes an app or service with those names, a Google search will tie them to National Review, which hosts dangerous unsafe content about “freedom of expression and association,” which is both a dog whistle and a duck call to white-supremacist insurrectionist forces who regularly spread disinformation, like “2 + 2 = 4.” What if the four identifies as a five? C’mon, man. Try to keep up.

(Editor’s note: Mocking Joe Biden by saying “C’mon, man” will no longer be permitted, as it assumes the gender of the person making the criticism.)