Election Fraud 2020 Facebook Meta Twitter
News

Facebook censored posts at the request of the Democrat party / Biden administration

Leave a comment

I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal, and thought it was a good idea to post about it, so that if I get into a debate about Big Tech with someone, I can just find it again. I’ll also link to some other social media censorship stories so we have a few of them.

Here’s the article from the Wall Street Journal: (archived)

Facebook removed content related to Covid-19 in response to pressure from the Biden administration, including posts claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company communications viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The emails show Facebook executives discussing how they managed users’ posts about the origins of a pandemic that the administration was seeking to control. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” asked Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, in a July 2021 email to colleagues.

“We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”

[…]The email, and a number of other such internal company communications, were obtained by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating what GOP lawmakers say is the Biden administration’s improper efforts to censor Americans’ speech on social media about Covid and other topics.

Over at the far left The Hill, I found this related article:

Facebook had refused to open its own files on government censorship efforts. That came to an end when the House Judiciary Committee finally moved to hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress.

The resulting Facebook Files confirmed what many of us have suspected for years. Indeed, the emails proved to be a mirror image of what had occurred at Twitter — a massive effort by the government to pressure the company to censor its critics and other dissenting voices.

Not just truth, but even jokes were censored:

There was to be no allowance for humor or even true information that did not advance the government’s narrative. The House has uncovered a myriad of grants given to academic and private groups to blacklist and target those with opposing views, including the posting of true information.

There was an array of government agencies targeting citizens and groups for censorship. In another hearing, I testified on efforts by Jen Easterly, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to extend her regulatory authority by declaring that “critical infrastructure” includes “our cognitive infrastructure,” in which she saw it as her role to build “resilience to misinformation and disinformation.”

The administration also demanded the removal of “malinformation” that is “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

Government-funded groups such as the Stanford Virality Project declared that even “true stories…could fuel hesitancy” over taking the vaccine or other measures. The Twitter files showed that this included “worrisome jokes.”

What’s a good remedy for this? Where do the people who were censored go to get justice? Maybe we should have criminal trials for the leaders of these social media companies, who seem to have violated the First Amendment rights of Americans.

One more thing that I found at Trending Politics:

The House Judiciary Committee received a host of subpoenaed materials documenting the correspondence between the White House and Facebook. Among these materials were memos that showed the White House was pressuring the social media to change their algorithms to promote media outlets that the White House approved at the explicit expense of outlets that the White House disapproved of. The ostensible reason for this request was to discourage the spread of misinformation.

One memo dated April 14, 2021, shows White House digital director Rob Flaherty requesting that Facebook “change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?”

Anyway, I’ve collected some of my previous posts about Facebook helping the Democrat party and interfering in our elections.

Leave a comment