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“Repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor”
By Daniel Greenfield
There’s been a debate between government censorship advocates and First Amendment defenders.
The former claim that Big Tech censorship involving such subjects as COVID, the previous election and assorted other issues viewed as ‘dangerous misinformation’ by the leftist establishment is ‘private action’.
Even when there was a clear chain of government messages urging the censorship of specific individuals and topics, they describe this as ‘jawboning’ and argue that the government has a ‘free speech’ right to persuade tech monopolies to censor people they consider dangerous. This lunatic argument, which essentially makes the First Amendment a dead letter, won over some judges and even Supreme Court justices.
That’s why this letter from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is important.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg also mentions that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed.
Zuckerberg comes fairly close to admitting that the only reason some of the COVID material was censored was because of government pressure. Would the censorship have happened without government pressure? That’s a question House Judiciary members might consider asking, but Zuckerberg is suggesting it would not have. That means the censorship cannot be considered private action and is government censorship.
That’s significant because the Biden-Harris administration had tried to launder its censorship through private actors, and Zuckerberg’s letter, along with Elon Musk’s Twitter disclosures, undermines that case.
Core people from two major social media platforms have come forward to say that the censorship on their platforms was carried out at the behest of the government. How can that be “private action”?
This is a smoking gun in the murder attempt on the First Amendment.