More Government Censorship Revealed:
A Look at Facebook Files, Parts 1 and 2
A few weeks ago, House Judiciary Committee Chairman and head of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Jim Jordan released the “Facebook Files, Parts 1 and 2,” which are an effort to act as a companion guide to the “Twitter Files.” In it, he set out to prove that the federal government pressured social media companies to censor posts and accounts of average and influential Americans. Although this is already common knowledge to those who are not still under the spell of government narrative syndrome (the people who still believe that social media platforms are simply private companies that just coincidentally align their content moderation with the official narrative), the more information that comes out on this, the better. There should be no doubt that the federal government, and particularly the Biden administration, violated the First Amendment and censored speech (Donald Trump did participate in this as well).
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the federal government would attempt to censor so-called “misinformation.” The John Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum told us that they were going to combat such information in their October 2019 Event 201 pandemic simulation that involved what to do in case a bat coronavirus started circulating around the planet. Their “prediction” came true just months after that exercise, and the next thing you knew, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms were complying with takedown requests from the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In the Twitter Files (see my article for a full breakdown of the first fifteen parts), it was revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was flagging what it deemed as problematic posts and accounts, silencing the Hunter Biden laptop story (the FBI lied and said that it was Russian disinformation, and this probably affected the results of the election), and meeting (weekly and monthly) with social media companies to discuss “threats” in the information world. The Facebook Files suggest that the same type of action was being taken with Meta (Facebook’s parent company). In fact, an email was sent to Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg showing the “continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House.” This “pressure” was not to simply follow the law, but rather, it constituted as a threat to force the removal of posts that the government did not like, in violation of the First Amendment.
President Joe Biden’s Senior Advisor Andy Slavitt and his crew considered Facebook a “misinformation factory” that needed to eliminate even memes from the platform (one such meme said, “10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear…. ‘Did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine? You may be entitled…”). A video by Tucker Carlson was also a target of President Biden, and Facebook reduced its visibility, as well as other information that was arbitrarily rated as “partly false,” by 50% to appease him (COVID-19 and vaccine “misinformation” was relegated by 80%). Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also got the corporation to censor information from the so-called “disinformation dozen.”
Early on, Facebook was censoring information on the idea of a “manmade or manufactured” virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was literally conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. The lab leak theory, which National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins actively attempted to cast doubt on and eliminate (for no suspicious reason, of course), was suddenly allowed to spread online again after the Biden administration announced an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 to see if the theory was plausible. Gee surprise, Facebook aligned its policies with what was convenient for the government, and particularly Fauci (who may soon be under investigation for lying to Congress about American funding of the gain-of-function research in Wuhan), until it was no longer feasible to keep the charade going. The Facebook Files reveal that the company received pressure to censor the lab leak theory, and at the time, we were considered spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theorists for posting about it, until the government decided that speech regarding this theory was permitted (it is funny how all of the news and social media lined up perfectly with the government’s narrative at all times during the pandemic, and there was no mainstream platform that raised serious challenges, which if there were no coordinated effort, you would expect).
According to the Facebook Files, the White House also expanded its censorship of true, false, satirical, and humorous information regarding the COVID-19 vaccine program. Yes, even true information, such as side effects, that led to hesitancy was eliminated. There was clearly an agenda and a narrative that needed to be kept up to mislead the public into taking the jab, and regardless of where you fall on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, this is pure evil. You do not mislead people into something that could harm them for the sake of boosting numbers, giving profits to pharmaceutical companies, and pushing public policies that may or may not turn out to be effective (if the vaccine is a successful and worthwhile product, it will be obvious to people, and they will flock to it on their own). If we truly do have sovereignty over our own bodies, the choice should be ours, without mandates or influence from government.
Even though Facebook’s President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg initially resisted the censorship requests from the government because they would pose a “significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression,” the company was worried about the repercussions for not complying with Slavitt’s demands. In fact, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said that social media companies “should be held accountable,” regardless of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, if they allowed information that the government classified as “misinformation.” This meant that the federal government was threatening Facebook with increased regulations (and perhaps lawsuits and other consequences) for noncompliance, and President Biden even went on television and said that social media companies were “killing” people. Of course, speech never kills anyone, and people who argue that are simply attempting to justify censorship and authoritarianism (bad speech can always be combated with good speech, and nobody’s words alone cause or compel anyone to act on anything).
Clegg and Sandberg worked behind the scenes to meet the demands presented by the White House. As a result of the threats from the Biden administration, Facebook altered its content moderation policies to align with government censorship, so for anyone still arguing that Facebook is a private company that can choose its own terms of service, the government was actually the one determining those terms of service. The company became nothing less than a de facto arm of the government’s surveillance-police-censorship state.
Yet, we continue living our lives as if nothing has occurred, and many of us naively deny that the government even censored information, or they argue that censorship is necessary under certain conditions for public safety. In fact, the Biden administration is appealing the recent United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana decision that limited its ability to do what has been revealed in the Facebook Files on account of free speech violations (content moderation and directing social media companies to take down certain posts and accounts). Yes, President Biden is actually arguing that not being permitted to censor speech is a threat to national and election security (just like it was argued previously that the government needs to spy and collect information on Americans to keep them safe). Now, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit could reverse the lower court’s decision and solidify censorship into our authoritarian state (if the Supreme Court also agrees). We cannot rely on the court system to protect our rights. It is great when we get a victory, but ultimately, we need to take our own action.
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.