When government pressures private companies to censor people, the government is itself acting to censor people.
That the Biden administration is acting to censor unapproved discussion of COVID-19 isn’t a guess. It has publicly urged social-media companies to prohibit “misinformation.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, for example, has said that Biden’s administration is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing. . . . You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”
The Liberty Justice Center is now suing the administration and firms like Facebook and Twitter for violating the First Amendment rights of people like Justin Hart, a plaintiff in the case.
Hart is a data analyst who questions the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. For his fielding and repeating those questions, he was booted from social media accounts.
Explaining its litigation, the Liberty Justice Center observes that “dominant social media platforms and the White House are openly collaborating to eliminate social media posts about COVID-19 that the administration finds objectionable, and to cancel or suspend the Facebook and Twitter accounts of people who raise issues about COVID they don’t want the public to see.”
I tend to agree with Hart’s conclusion, but that is not the point.
More fundamentally, I am inclined to discover what we might learn from unfettered discussion of the facts. Which is one of the many reasons we need that First Amendment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “The Colluder-in-Chief”
The First Amendment is just a bunch of words on paper. It has no value without people who will abide by it. If social media accounts can be shut down because they don’t conform to the current narrative, then people need to reject those social media companies and take their business elsewhere. Easier said than done. The marketplace of ideas is taking its final breath.
Pat, personally, I’d like to see what is now called “social media” replaced with ‘blogs connected by voluntary networking protocols. People who don’t want the challenge of individually arranging for their own websites can form syndicates to share the costs (pecuniary and non-pecuniary) of getting domain names and hosting, and of installing and maintaining software.
Daniel, I agree. I have never used these social media networks. I go to specific sites (blog and news) and I support them financially.
I say it’s easier said than done (for people to get off social media) because most people just want to remain in contact with friends and family. The news feeds are a bonus to them. They don’t see the danger in relying on a single site like Facebook for accurate information.
We’re very close to not having a First Amendment at all, if we aren’t there already:
http://dispatchesfromheck.blogspot.com/2021/09/media-and-banks-as-censorship-tools.html