Shareholders of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, are pressing the tech giant to make public any requests they have from the White House to politically remove “problematic” information from its platforms.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of a shareholder proposal submitted to Alphabet by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), an ethics watchdog group that holds a voting stake in the corporation.
The disclosure requirement could make known whether the administration has instructed tech companies to take down information it considers misleading. If that were the case, it would raise concerns about government censorship. Back in July, the White House said it was in “regular touch” with social media platforms in order to fight “misinformation” on the internet.
“The case for this kind of disclosure is double barreled. All citizens should be aware when the government engages in censorship, even if it is through a private-sector company, and shareholders of that company should know when they become a party to it,” stated Peter Flaherty, chairman of NLPC.
“The administration keeps labeling certain information about the pandemic ‘disinformation,’ and gets it yanked off social media, only to later embrace the same information. Alphabet should not be contributing to such a farce,” Flaherty added.
Should the proposal be approved by a shareholder vote, which would be a difficult feat to accomplish because the company’s voting shares are primarily controlled by its founders and insiders, then Alphabet would be obligated to “provide a report, published on the company’s website and updated semi-annually — and omitting proprietary information and at reasonable cost — that specifies the Company’s policy in responding to requests to remove or take down material from its platforms by the Executive Office of the President, Centers for Disease Control, or any other agency or entity of the United States Government.”
Moreover, the tech firm would be forced to disclose “an itemized listing of such take-down requests, including the name and title of the official making the request, the nature and scope of the request, the date of the request, the outcome of the request, and a reason or rationale for the Company’s response, or lack thereof.”
The NLPC argued that any coordination between Alphabet and Biden to censor information would constitute “unconstitutional censorship, opening the Company to liability claims by victims.”
The watchdog cited Supreme Court rulings “that private entities may not engage in suppression of speech at the behest of government, as it has the same effect as direct government censorship.”
YouTube recently faced wide criticism for deleting a widely shared video in which podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed virologist Robert Malone, who is considered a pioneer in work that led to the creation of mRNA vaccines. During the interview, Malone criticized the COVID-19 vaccine.
In addition, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R), Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) have taken aim at Google and YouTube for scrubbing their videos that questioned coronavirus policies like COVID passports and mask mandates.
The Free Beacon reports:
In July, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration was “in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team, given, as [Surgeon General] Dr. [Vivek] Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.”
Psaki said the administration flagged “problematic” posts for social media companies and urged the platforms to “take faster action against harmful posts.”
Alphabet is likely to seek a waiver from the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid bringing up the NLPC’s proposal for consideration. Under the Biden administration, the SEC has taken a supportive stance toward left-leaning activist shareholders. In November, the administration expanded the type of proposals that companies are required to consider to include “certain proposals that raise significant social policy issues.”
Liberal activists have learned that by acquiring stocks, they can have influence in the decisions of large corporations. In 2021, shareholder activists succeeded in placing fossil fuel opponents on the board of Exxon Mobil — after they had forced the company to disclose its carbon emission impact in 2017.
Also last year, there were a record number of corporate board diversity proposals that originated with left-wing activist shareholders.
