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.

• Twitter and Facebook suspend LibsOfTikTok after she reported on sex-change surgery on kids
• Facebook and Twitter spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop to help Biden win in 2020
• Facebook / Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election meddling violated bribery laws
• Peer-reviewed medical journal blasts Facebook “fact checkers” for censorship
• Facebook has a long record of censoring speech critical of Democrats
• Facebook fact-checker caught plagiarizing 54 articles
• Facebook bans Christian professor for disagreeing with Biden’s executive actions
• Facebook “non-partisan” fact-checker revealed to be a far-left Trump-hating Democrat
• Facebook “fact-checker” Politifact forced to retract “false” rating against Candace Owens
• When Facebook fact-checkers conflict with peer-reviewed studies, who is right?
• Potential violation of election law: Facebook and Twitter censor Biden scandal
• Facebook and Google removing content that harms Democrat party
• Facebook censors admit that they suppress Republican content to help Democrat Party
• Facebook censors interview with abortion survivor to help Democrats win 2020 election
• Facebook uses pro-abortion “fact checkers” to label pro-life pages “fake news”
• Facebook bans Christian apologist David Wood for posting the death threats he received
• Facebook censors criticism of Democrat Party, especially before “important elections”

Did you know that women tend to be further to the left than men? According to surveys, women are more leftist than men on abortion, same-sex marriage, and a host of other policies. I’ll show you a few surveys below. But even more interesting is that there is a link between support for leftist policies, and higher mental illness. Let’s take a look at it.

First, here is an article from The Hill:

Forty-four percent of young women counted themselves liberal in 2021, compared to 25 percent of young men, according to Gallup Poll data analyzed by the Survey Center on American Life. The gender gap is the largest recorded in 24 years of polling. The finding culminates years of rising liberalism among women ages 18 to 29, without any increase among their male peers.

That article is a bit old, here’s a new one from this week in The Post Millennial:

In annual surveys over the last few years, data pulled from Monitoring the Future has shown that about a quarter of high school seniors identify as conservative or very conservative. Only 13 percent of the 12th grade boys identify as liberal.

[…]The graph excludes moderate students, but of those high school seniors that do identify politically, around 65 percent of boys were conservative while only around 31 percent of girls identified that way.

According to surveys, young women are also more likely to support abortion under any circumstances (40 to 27) and more likely to support same-sex marriage than men.

I don’t support abortion because I favor the rights of unborn babies over the happiness of adults. I don’t support same-sex marriage because studies show children do better when they are raised by a mother and a father. And I think that’s why most of these men are with me, they follow that same reasoning, and side with the children against the adults.

I thought this part of the article was interesting:

As one Politico analyst put it, “Democrats have a masculinity problem.” Citing trends among black and Latino voters, the analyst pointed out that even in minority communities that have voted majority Democrat, men have been turning to the Republican party at higher rates than women.

Some conservative figures such as Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager (through PragerU) have millions of followers on YouTube, a platform where the users are majority male.

In addition, one of the more popular conservative political podcasts, The Ben Shapiro Show, has an audience that skews overwhelmingly male at 86 percent. The audience also skews younger, 18-44, in comparison to Fox’s former show with Tucker Carlson, 25-54, which skews slightly female at 53 percent.

This is good news. Boys are finding themselves role models who they see as “strong”. And those new role models are conservative. These stronger role models champion truth, and they make moral judgements. Even if it hurts other people’s feelings.

Let’s go on to the second point. These leftist policies are having a bad effect on young women’s mental health.

Feminist web site Evie Magazine reported on the some 2020 findings by Pew Research (left-wing pollster):

A 2020 Pew Research study reveals that over half of white, liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point.

[T]he study, which is titled Pew American Trends Panel: Wave 64, was dated March 2020 — over a year ago.

The study, which examined white liberals, moderates, and conservatives, both male and female, found that conservatives were far less likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those who identified as either liberal or even “very liberal.”

[…]White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

I found an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about how one leftist policy concern (global warming alarmism) is tied to higher rates of mental illness.

It says:

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

The study found that the mental illness was more common in younger people:

Climate anxiety and dissatisfaction with government responses are widespread in children and young people in countries across the world and impact their daily functioning.

So now we are looking at a direct link between the policies of the left, and the lower mental health of the left. And we know that more women than men are on the left. And we see more mental illness among women.  Interesting, isn’t it?

And this has consequences. Leftist women are noticing that men are more conservative than they are, and it’s affecting their dating:

The marriage rate is also declining. Could this decline in marriage be related to the increase in leftist women, and all the related mental illnesses that leftist women have? Does it make sense for a conservative man to enter a relationship where he pays all the costs and bears all the risks, but all the decisions are being made by a leftist woman? It’s dangerous for a man to do that.

Consider that the divorce rate is very high right now, and divorce takes away a man’s money, his access to his kids, and his freedom. Women initiate 69% of divorces. College-educated women  – who are especially leftist – initiate 90% of divorces. This high divorce rate cannot be blamed on men, because the divorce rate of lesbians is the highest of all. No man to blame in that situation.

Why would a man sign up to be controlled by feminist institutions, like the divorce courts? Men are not interested in projects where they have to pay for everything, but someone else is making the decisions. Especially if they get blamed when things go wrong.

Facing all of these risks, a man would have to be crazy to even talk to a leftist woman – much less date her. Unfortunately, we aren’t making enough young conservative women for these conservative young men to marry. And so, the marriage rate is declining. Young women today are not as conservative as previous generations.

I know a lot of people today are worried about young men falling under the influence of bad role models. But the surveys show that boys tend to have the right role models, and the right political views. So, we need to work on making young women more conservative.

One reason why Christians are devoted to the moral law is because we think that these boundaries are in place for a reason. We think that if we just do what makes us happy, then we will end up worse off. Sadly, the secular left in America are so addicted to “don’t judge” that they want to smash all those moral boundaries. What happens when harm follows? Do they offer to fix it or pay for it themselves?

Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail, about the pain you can expect if you let secular leftists cut parts of you off, in exchange for insurance company money and virtue signaling rights.

Keep in mind that the UK Daily Mail is far left, and 100% on board with transgenderism – including sex-change surgery.

It says:

One of the first studies into the side effects of transgender surgeries has revealed alarmingly high rates of post-op pain, aching during intercourse, and bladder problems, raising troubling questions for this new frontier of medicine.

A huge majority – 81 percent – of those who had gender-affirming surgery in the past five years said they endured pain simply from moving around in the weeks and months after going under the knife.

Researchers from the University of Florida and Brooks Rehabilitation, a health non-profit, showed that more than half of trans surgery patients endured pain during sex, and nearly a third could not control their bladders.

Here are some details:

UF researchers studied 21 trans and non-binary people aged between 20 and 70 who had undergone trans surgeries in the past five years — mostly mastectomies and vaginoplasties.

81 percent endured pain in their lower back, groin, pelvis, chest, or shoulders in the weeks, months, and even years after their procedures, researchers found.

Another 57 percent found sexual intercourse painful.

Meanwhile, 29 percent suffered urinary incontinence or a frequent and urgent need to go to the bathroom, researchers found.

Likewise, many male-to-female transitioners who get a neo-vagina created are surprised to discover that they have to insert a ‘dilator’ into their canal for up to an hour each day after surgery.

Without using a dilator, which resembles a sex toy, the neo-vagina can gradually shorten in depth, said Dr Hill. Some trans women must use them for the rest of their lives.

‘That’s something a lot of people don’t realize,’ she added.

Now, you might ask yourself what happens when these surgeries result in a lot of pain and suffering for the victims. Maybe it’s only in heartless, cruel America where the victims have to suffer. Maybe in wonderful, tolerant Canada, the victims get free health care, to alleviate the pain of having their body parts sawed off by greedy ghouls.

Let’s see, using this article from the UK Daily Mail:

An indigenous transgender woman has slammed Canada’s healthcare system for rejecting her euthanasia request despite the pain she endures from a surgically-built vagina.

In social media posts, Lois Cardinal, a self-proclaimed ‘sterilized First Nations post-op transsexual’ said regret over her medical transition led her to apply for a lethal injection in January.

Cardinal, who lives on a native reserve near St. Paul, Alberta, posted her medical records from the request online this week to draw attention to radical gender ideology.

Her case underscores the perils of Canada’s ultra-liberal healthcare system — one of the world’s most permissive for both euthanasia and affirming an individual’s chosen gender.

‘I’m in constant discomfort and pain,’ the 35-year-old told DailyMail.com.

So, in Canada, after the government-run public schools have brainwashed people into wanting to change genders, then they deny you treatment for the mess they caused. But you can apply for a free government-funded murder though. But you might have to wait, and re-apply.

We can do better than letting the “don’t judge” secular leftists run our country. They are not authorities on what is wise. And they shouldn’t be elected to government.