Twitter collusion: The federal censors must be held accountable
Washington Examiner
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In contrast to the hair-on-fire raging of the left-wing base, elected Democrats have been notably quiet about the continued release of internal Twitter communications, dubbed the “Twitter Files.” We hope that begins to change now it has been revealed that the Trump administration also abused its connections with Big Tech companies to suppress truthful information and control public narratives.
Specifically, David Zweig revealed Monday that Trump administration officials held weekly calls, not just with Twitter, but with Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as well, to combat “misinformation” on their platforms.
TWITTER FILES SHOW FBI NEEDS HOUSECLEANING
Among the “misinformation” that the Trump administration wanted to suppress? Any stories about “runs on grocery stores” at the height of the COVID lockdown. It is understandable that officials would want to limit panic during an emergency. But there are many of us who experienced shortages at stores; it was not a story one could hide.
More to the point, the government has no business suppressing truthful information it doesn’t like.
Zweig’s latest communications show the Biden administration continued to pressure Big Tech platforms to suppress tweets from people telling the truth, such as Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorf and Dr. Andrew Bostom of Rhode Island. In both cases, medical professionals with extensive training were censored by untrained and unrestrained Twitter moderators following orders from government public health officials.
As we suspected, the number of government agencies implicated in wrongdoing through Big Tech censorship continues to grow. Thanks to a new trove of emails released by Matt Taibbi on Saturday, we now know that the State Department and “Other Government Agencies,” a euphemism for the CIA, used the FBI as a kind of doorman to get its social media surveillance and censorship needs met by Twitter.
The FBI made so many requests for censorship that, at one point, a Twitter legal executive emailed her boss, noting, “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days” from the FBI. Her boss responded that it was “odd” the FBI was “searching for violations of our policies.”
The CDC, the FBI, the State Department, and the CIA have no legitimate authority to police speech. Free speech is the preeminent right protected in the Bill of Rights. It seems that a combination of overreaction to routine Russian efforts to influence our presidential election in 2016, paired with the traumatizing COVID emergency, enabled the deep state to deputize Big Tech platforms into a widespread network of disinformation.
House Republicans should hold extensive hearings and investigations into government efforts to censor speech and control domestic political narratives. Those who overstepped their legal authority should be identified and held accountable.
There is no place for this kind of government behavior in any democracy, especially one that prizes the First Amendment as highly as we do.
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