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You Have the Right to Free Speech. You Do Not Have the Right to Be Heard.

By Vahid Razavi
A fallen tree lying across rocks in a dark, quiet forest

Notes on algorithmic burial, the manufactured noise floor, and the illusion of an open public square in the West

By Vahid Razavi

There is an old question. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

It is a fair description of speech in the West today.

The right to speak has never been more secure on paper, or more meaningless in practice. Nobody has to arrest you. Nobody has to burn the book. The modern method is quieter and far more efficient: the work is permitted to exist, and then it is placed where no one will find it. What remains is the illusion of an open public square — a place where everyone is talking and nobody is being heard.

The noise is not accidental. It is manufactured. State and corporate content floods every channel at a volume no independent voice can match. Search rankings are engineered. Recommendation systems demote whatever fails to serve the business model. Reputation firms exist for the express purpose of pushing inconvenient material off the first page. And beneath all of it, the oldest censor is still working: ordinary people who say nothing because they know what speaking will cost them at work or in their community.

What follows is not a complaint about my career. It is a set of observations. The mechanics of this system are difficult to see in the abstract and easy to see when you can watch them operate on a single body of work from beginning to end. Mine happens to be the one I have the records for.

1. The Reference Desk

My first book, The Age of Nepotism, was published in 2009. It carried links from Wikipedia back to the book’s site. Those links were removed.

Since then I have published two more. Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof: Sleeping Under the Cell Tower came out in 2018 and is critical of Amazon and the wider industry. No Ethics in Big Tech: An Insider’s Case Against Silicon Valley’s War on Humanity and the Fight to Make Them Pay was released in August of this year under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Both are free. I am not selling anything.

Between 2009 and now I produced and published more than 350 videos across two YouTube channels, BizCloud and Ethics in Technology — interviews with technology executives, veterans, civil liberties attorneys, religious leaders, activists, comedians, and Bay Area residents who showed up because they cared where the industry was taking us. A subcollection is preserved at the Internet Archive.

None of it has been able to hold a listing on Wikipedia. Every submission concerning my publications has been deleted.

I want to be precise about why this matters, because the objection is predictable: Wikipedia has notability standards, and self-published work does not meet them. That is exactly the point. The standard requires independent secondary coverage — coverage from the same media institutions that will not report on work critical of their advertisers, their owners, or their governments. The result is a closed loop. The press does not cover you, so the encyclopedia does not list you, so the search engines have nothing authoritative to index, so the press has no reason to notice you. Layer on an editing corps that is largely anonymous and open to anyone with the patience to argue, and you get a reference layer for the entire internet that reproduces existing power rather than describing what is actually there.

2. The Suspension

I launched No Ethics in Big Tech on Hiroshima Day, August 6, and announced it on Facebook. Within hours, my personal account was suspended and my author page was delisted.

Meta already held my passport details. It asked for a photograph that I provided. I appealed. Rather than restore the account, Meta restricted it. Three days later, on Nagasaki Day, it suspended and delisted the author page and its roughly 7,000 followers. This time the appeal required a video selfie showing every angle of my face. I provided it. Meta approved it, restored the page for a few hours, and delisted it again.

I do not know whether a human being made any of those decisions. That is part of the problem. There is no one to ask, no reason given, and no appeal beyond the biometric one.

I would note only this for context. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch documented more than 1,050 cases of Meta removing or suppressing Palestine-related content over a sixty-day window, across more than sixty countries. In the weeks after October 7, 2023, Israel’s Cyber Unit sent platforms roughly 9,500 takedown requests, about 60 percent of them to Meta, and platforms complied at a rate of 94 percent. A company that can move that quickly for a government can move quickly for a book.

3. The Professional Network

I have roughly 8,000 contacts on LinkedIn. For years I have published fact sheets there, free, documenting the business practices of specific technology companies. They are sourced and available to anyone who wants them.

From 8,000 contacts and active participation in professional groups, a post critical of the industry is fortunate to reach 100 views.

Nothing was removed. Nothing was flagged. The post simply does not travel. This is the most common form of censorship in the West and the hardest to prove, because from the outside it is indistinguishable from public indifference. That is the design. There is no removal notice to screenshot and no decision to appeal — only a number that stays small.

4. The Advertising Policy

Two years ago I posted a public video asking Elon Musk to provide Starlink service to hospitals in Gaza, and put thirty dollars behind it as an advertisement. TikTok determined that this violated its advertising policy and suspended my advertising account.

The content was a request for connectivity for hospitals and aid workers.

TikTok describes the suspension as temporary. It runs until October 2033 — longer than the platform has existed.

5. The Festival Circuit

Forever Peace Now is a documentary drawn from sixteen years of documenting Silicon Valley, its executives, and the industry’s role in armed conflict. I released it free of charge on YouTube and Vimeo, because the honor for a documentarian is that the work is seen.

It has been screened at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, and at the National Archive in Santiago. It had its world premiere at Teatro Novedades in Santiago on December 10, 2025 — Human Rights Day. RootsAction.org hosted an online screening and panel. Amnesty International Castilla–La Mancha screened it in Toledo, Spain, in collaboration with the Castilla–La Mancha International Social Film Festival. It has also screened at the Palestine Museum, with BDS Mexico, and at the Cinema House in Yerevan, Armenia.

Not one of those screenings came through FilmFreeway. I made more than twenty submissions to festivals large and small, paid the fees, and received no screening in any city. No festival gave a reason.

I claim no entitlement to a slot. Festivals program what they choose, and rejection is the ordinary condition of the work. What I would observe is that an industry drawing steady revenue from war, and steady glamour from depicting it, has never had much appetite for the other side of that ledger. Nothing structural has changed since March 27, 1973, when Marlon Brando refused the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Godfather and sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in his place. She was given sixty seconds and could deliver only a fraction of what he had written; the full statement went to the press afterward. It is worth reading in its entirety.

6. The Newsroom

The film is dedicated to Roozbeh Vadi, the son of my cousin, executed by the Iranian regime in August 2025 on charges of espionage. Iran Human Rights, which tracks these cases, has stated that such sentences are issued without fair trials and rest on confessions obtained under duress.

While I was in Santiago I held a press briefing about the film. Two major news agencies sent journalists and camera crews, conducted interviews, and produced articles and video packages. Those reporters submitted the work to their editors. Nothing ran. No explanation was given to them, and none to me.

Other Chilean outlets did cover the film, and I am grateful for it — El Mostrador, El Ciudadano, Pressenza, Radio Nuevo Mundo, and Agenda Transparencia among them. The point is not that coverage is impossible. The point is what happened inside the two larger newsrooms, where finished reporting died somewhere between the reporter and the desk.

On my cousin’s execution, the outlets that covered it were Iran International and the Jerusalem Post. I am grateful to both. But the documentary itself, ParentsPlea.com — which documents state violence and injustice from Gaza to Iran to the United States — and the petition to hold Big Tech companies and executives accountable under universal jurisdiction have gone unreported.

State-owned or nominally independent, most media organizations report according to the interests they serve rather than the public interest or the full set of facts that actual investigative journalism would surface. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an observation about ownership, advertising, and access, and it is available to anyone who has watched a story die between a reporter and an editor.

7. The Index

For the launch of No Ethics in Big Tech I paid for guaranteed distribution through the IssueWire press wire service and added a fifteen-dollar Google Ads display budget through IssueWire’s direct service.

Google indexed exactly one thing: the IssueWire release itself. No outlet republished anything that Google would index. Google rejected the display advertisements. IssueWire offered a fifteen-dollar credit toward a future release.

Fifteen dollars is not a meaningful sum. That is what makes it a useful test. The system did not reject a campaign for lack of budget. It declined the subject. Unless the pitch is the next hyped Silicon Valley product — preferably one with a weapon attached — the wire services cannot get you covered, including the ones that call themselves issue wires.

The Shape of the Thing

None of this required a censor. No official ever told me I could not publish. Every book is available. The film is online. The websites are up. The formal right to speak was never touched, because it never needed to be.

What was removed was distribution.

The encyclopedia will not list the work because the press has not covered it. The press will not cover it because it is inconvenient to the people the press depends on. The platforms will not carry it because the business model rewards engagement, not argument. The festivals will not screen it because the industry’s money comes from the thing being criticized. And the search engine, which now mediates nearly all of it, will not surface what nothing else has validated.

Every one of those institutions can say, honestly, that it censored nothing. Together they produce censorship — and they produce it more efficiently than any ministry of information ever did, because there is no office to petition and no name on the decision.

The most damaging effect is not on the people who test the system. It is on everyone who watches them do it. People see the suspended account, the narrowed career, the reputation quietly handled, and they draw the correct conclusion. They say nothing at work. They say nothing in public. They call it prudence. That is the point of the arrangement. Silence people impose on themselves costs nothing to enforce and cannot be photographed.

So the question stands, and it is not rhetorical.

If a tree falls in a forest in the West, and the platforms will not carry the sound, and the newsrooms will not run it, and the index will not list it — does it make a sound?

It does. But someone has to be standing close enough to hear it, and that is now a deliberate choice rather than an accident of proximity.

Vahid Razavi is the author of No Ethics in Big Tech and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, and the director of the documentary Forever Peace Now. His work is self-funded — no corporate sponsors, no government grants, no advertising. Learn more at NoEthicsInBigTech.com, ForeverPeaceNow.com, ParentsPlea.com, and MyAWSStory.com.

Sources and Verification

Books and archive

Meta content moderation

Marlon Brando and the 45th Academy Awards

Forever Peace Now

Roozbeh Vadi

Research, fact-checking, and structural editing assisted by Claude (Anthropic). The observations, arguments, and conclusions are entirely those of the author.

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