Viral Sophie Cunningham meme reaches WWE ring
WWE stars Tiffany Stratton and Chelsea Green gave a hat tip to Sophie Cunningham on "Friday Night SmackDown." (This video contains AI-assisted content.)
I’ve been online for more than 30 years. Sometime this July, my Twitter/X account turns 18. That means it’s old enough to vote. The site itself launched publicly 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006. In all, I’ve been online since before the World Wide Web was worldwide back in the 1990s. I’m still a fan of print, but the impact of social media is undeniable. What mankind is still wrestling with is whether that’s good or bad.
To be fair, it’s a lot of both. And that’s an unpredictability governments and lefty journalists hate. The Charlie Kirk assassination went viral unedited. We all saw it, and it was etched into our hearts forever. The same is true of the attacks on President Donald Trump, terrorism and the war in Ukraine. That level of unrestricted freedom is what governments around the world want to stop. If no one can tell what officials are doing, no one can stop them.
America came within a hair’s breadth of that freedom being taken away and censorship taking hold here — maybe everywhere. All the social media platforms were working together to control what we said online during the Biden years, working with foreign entities and so-called fact-checkers to censor more. Tesla founder Elon Musk and Trump stopped them. Musk bought Twitter, which broke the social media cartel, and Trump was reelected.
The censors and control freaks haven’t given up. There is too much power at stake for them ever to stop.
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It’s not all bleak, thankfully. Ordinary people — and even famous people — often go viral on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and it can mark them for years. Tens of millions of people have seen the video of a young woman getting upset because puzzle pieces of various shapes all got placed into the square hole. Her reactions were hilarious and iconic.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio became a lasting internet meme for his ability to take on many jobs. He’s been edited into everything from the king of Iran to taking over for the U.S. Olympic ski team. Indiana Fever forward Sophie Cunningham scored points with fans and non-fans alike simply by pointing. The WNBA player got into a verbal fight with another player, and Cunningham’s response was to point with all the power of Uncle Sam.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) and the US Permanent Representative to NATO Matthew Whitaker (L) arrive at NATO Headquarters on the first day of the NATO Foreign Ministers' Meeting on April 3, 2025, in Brussels, Belgium. (Omar Havana/Getty Images)
The internet connected our world. Social media connected people with shared interests — loves and often hates. Cooks joined groups about recipes, sports fans congregated around their favorite teams, and political addicts got their fix 24/7. Unfortunately, that also made it easier for criminal gangs and traffickers to communicate. Porn, violent videos and the worst of human behavior are now readily available almost anywhere. Spend lots of time on social media, and you see the best and worst of mankind.
All of this is because we have the power, ordinary people like you and me. That wasn’t the case for nearly all of human history. Everything people read or saw was curated. Someone else decided. A limited number of publishers produced books, a limited number of news outlets produced stories and so on. Only the verbal record was there to counter it. The internet changed that.
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Establishment media lost control. The Washington Post, The New York Times and the rest of the leftist media now face pushback whenever they dump especially biased stories on a now-critical public. Americans learned of the Hunter Biden laptop story from social media, despite a massive campaign to suppress it. The same goes for the bogus Russian collusion narrative and lots more. The so-called public media outlets, such as NPR and PBS, finally lost their taxpayer funding, at least here in the U.S., because people finally saw them for what they were. And we are all witnessing the media’s Graham Platner fiasco in real time.
People walk past The New York Times Building, a 52-story skyscraper on the west side of Midtown Manhattan on January 14, 2025 in New York City. (Al Drago/Getty Images)
But there’s a price to pay for that freedom. Popularity is outpacing our ability to distinguish fact from fiction and right from wrong. There is a global effort to demonize Jewish people and slander them with every crime imaginable, far worse than the made-up "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Meanwhile, the terrorist group Hamas, which filmed and shared its barbarism against the people of Israel, is beloved on much of the internet. That is despite — or because of — posting videos of its members murdering more than 1,200 men, women and children and kidnapping 250 more.
That freedom terrifies governments, and they are fighting back against it. Not just communist China or authoritarian Russia, either. The allegedly free nations that are our core allies — the U.K., Germany, Canada, Australia and France — have all turned against free speech online.
There used to be three schools of thought on censorship. China believes in complete state control. Europe wants some regulation, and the U.S. wants mostly free speech. That’s no longer the case. Europe wants the same control China has. And many leftists in the U.S. want that here, too.
British police ignored a victim’s fatal wounds and, instead, arrested him. But the video went viral, and now millions know the name Henry Nowak. Only, instead of turning away from censorship, the U.K. is embracing it.
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British politicians decided to simply take free speech away from their citizens. They went from going after a few troublesome posters to arresting 12,000 people a year for free speech crimes. That was only the beginning. The current Labour government "has proposed tighter restrictions on social media platforms during general elections," according to GB News. The EU has advanced age verification, forcing users to identify themselves online. That’s the beginning of the end for European free speech online.
Both the EU and the U.K. have tried repeatedly to use those powers against American firms, too. British regulator Ofcom has sent letters to at least 197 U.S. firms about content that is perfectly legal here in America. The foreign tyrants tried to fine two of them.
We have to fight for the future of online freedom. There used to be three schools of thought on censorship. China believes in complete state control. Europe wants some regulation, and the U.S. wants mostly free speech. That’s no longer the case. Europe wants the same control China has. And many leftists in the U.S. want that here, too.
This battle begins again when Trump leaves office. If the Democrats win, they will try to align with foreign regulators who want to shut down American free speech. They may even join in and try to prosecute Musk, as European regulators have discussed.
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President Abraham Lincoln warned that "this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." The same is true for the internet. If the U.S. stays mostly free online, the EU and U.K. will either have to accept it or take action against U.S. firms and executives. Right now, they are hoping to wait out Trump and find friendlier Democrats who oppose hate speech, which is really just speech they hate.
Either way, expect European censors to continue efforts to force Americans to censor and many on the left to help them. We have to stop them. Our entire lives are lived online now, and if we lose free speech there, then we lose it entirely.
