The “Democrat establishment has been doing an end run around the First Amendment, using Big Tech as a proxy to stifle dissenting views.” This sentiment, which I expressed last year and on other occasions, is now the basis of a lawsuit filed against Joe Biden and other administration officials by two states’ attorneys general.
As the Washington Examiner reports:
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accused President Joe Biden and other top government officials in a lawsuit Thursday of colluding with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress speech under the guise of combating dangerous misinformation.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed the suit in an attempt to demonstrate the Biden administration’s alleged work with Big Tech companies to suppress speech pertaining to COVID-19-related information, election integrity, and other topics unfairly.
The lawsuit claims that Biden and his supporters, during the 2020 election campaign and now in office, have directly worked with executives and employees of Big Tech companies to censor content related to controversial political debates over the past two years.
“We allege that government officials in the Biden Administration, including President Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and others colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and Youtube to remove truthful information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, and more,” Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said in a press release. “I will not stand idly by while the Biden Administration attempts to trample on the First Amendment rights of Missourians and Americans.”
The suit also names Nina Jankowicz, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board,” who has been widely mocked for singing a pro-censorship song to the tune of Mary Poppins’s “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
The New York Post adds to the story, writing:
The 86-page suit accuses the federal government of violating free speech rights by threatening big tech companies into silencing conservative viewpoints.
“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation.’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” the filling claims.
“Labeling disfavored speech ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ does not strip it of First Amendment Protection … with the common understanding that some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation … the First Amendment seeks to guarantee.”
“Perhaps most notoriously, social media platforms aggressively censored an October 14, 2020 New York Post expose about the contents of the laptop of Hunter Biden, which had been abandoned in a Delaware repair shop and contained compromising photos and email communications about corrupt foreign business deals,” the filing states.
After The Post report on then-candidate Biden’s son was published, Twitter locked the paper out of its account for more than two weeks over baseless charges that the exposé used hacked information.
Twitter also blocked users from sharing the link to The Post article calling the link “potentially harmful.” Facebook also said it would limit the spread of The Post’s story on its own platform.
Yet just last month, almost a year and a half after the Post covered the laptop affair, The Washington Post and New York Times confirmed the story. But the censorship’s purpose had been served:
Joe Biden was elected — in part, a poll showed, by some voters who said they’d have reconsidered their support for the dotard candidate had they known about the laptop scandal.
There are many, many other high-profile examples of Big Tech censorship as well. As telling and serious as they are, however, focusing only on them doesn’t relate the extent and impact of GoogTwitFace truth suppression.
Consider: Dr. Robert Epstein, a liberal and the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, warned years ago that Big Tech now has the capacity to shift up to 15 million votes in an election — more than enough to sway the outcome. And it has this impact because the majority of what it does is invisible to most Americans.
Not Your Grandfather’s Book-burning
I’ve written about how The New American’s articles are often hidden in Google’s searches and suppressed by GoogTwitFace in general. Yet far from being singled out, TNA is just one of countless thousands of conservative entities and individuals censored via computer algorithm. Human intervention isn’t necessary — it’s built into the system and executed quietly, without fanfare.
Just consider “shadowbanning”: You post something to social media. But while Big Tech allows you to see it in your timeline, it’s hides it from your “followers,” either some or all. So you now have the illusion you’ve shared information, but in reality could be just talking to yourself.
Multiply this by those countless thousands being censored, and you have a staggering amount of truth (along with some untruth, no doubt) not being spread. If “knowledge is power,” this means Big Tech is robbing “one side” of much of its power.
It’s not hard figuring out what that side is, either. GoogTwitFace serves as the Democrats’ censorship arm because, first, Big Tech is controlled by party sympathizers (e.g., 98.7 percent of Twitter’s recent employee political donations have gone to Democrats). Second, the tech companies know that, unlike the GOP, the Democrats will punish them via regulation if they don’t do the party’s bidding.
Worse still, the states’ lawsuit contends, Democrat officials have been brazen enough to actually communicate with Big Tech bigwigs and direct the censorship. If this isn’t a First Amendment violation, it certainly is a distinction without a practical-effect difference.
For those interested, Attorney General Schmitt appeared Friday on Tucker Carlson Tonight (below) to discuss the states’ lawsuit.
