How the Biden censorship mafia controlled Facebook
Hudson Crozier
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In attempting to reconcile its online censorship efforts with the Constitution, President Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly said that it does not coerce social media companies to act on its content moderation demands.
Newly released emails related to the White House and Facebook put yet another hole in that argument. Coupled with the “Facebook Files” released by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), it is clear that the government held overbearing influence on the company for purposes of speech control.
INFLATION COMPLICATES BIDEN’S PATH BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE
We already know that the White House wanted tighter restrictions on content related to COVID-19 vaccines than Facebook initially did. Among other things, it targeted a Tucker Carlson video that did not violate Facebook’s policies and an anti-vaccine meme. One employee’s email described former White House adviser Andy Slavitt as “outraged” after the platform would not completely remove the meme. The employee told him that doing so would threaten “traditional boundaries of free expression.”
It has now been revealed that some employees were tattling on those less loyal to the White House. “[Slavitt] told me in confidence — so please treat it as such — that internal [Facebook] employees are leaking to his team … accounts of disobliging remarks made about [White House officials] by [Facebook] decision makers,” read an email from Facebook executive Brian Rice.
Slavitt said some, seemingly out of spite, wanted to confuse the White House deliberately “in order not to share the most telling/helpful data about content which contributes to vaccine hesitancy,” according to Rice.
“I was shocked and embarrassed that somehow we are perceived to be behaving so unprofessionally,” Rice said. His email ended with the warning (emphasis mine): “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup to take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too.”
Throughout these and other communications exposed in the past several months, tech employees acted as if angering the government would lead to adverse consequences. And why wouldn’t they?
By definition, it is not possible for a governing agency to have a noncoercive relationship with private citizens. Thus, bureaucrats convinced Facebook to make its “misinformation” policies “more aggressive” at their behest, effectively becoming policymakers in the company. And when some employees did not enjoy being their lackeys, others snitched on them so that the government would further pressure the company to conform to its will.
Fortunately, some in the judiciary are not falling for the government’s defense of censorship-by-proxy under the First Amendment. During oral arguments for the Missouri v. Biden case on Thursday, Judge Jennifer Elrod saw right through it.
“In these movies that we see with the mob … they don’t say and spell out things, but they have these ongoing relationships,” she said. “They never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence.’ But everybody just knows.”
Precisely. And it’s time to stop the Biden mob from carrying out its hit job on the right to free speech.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.