Election-Year Censorship
Social media companies were part of what Time magazine called “an extraordinary shadow effort” whose objective was to prevent Donald Trump from being reelected in 2020. Two years later, and surely emboldened by their success, they are back, their sights set on throwing the midterm elections to the Democrats.
There can be no doubt that social media is aligned with the left in a political cleansing of Republican candidates and voters. According to the Time article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
Of course “disinformation” and “viral smears” were anything that hurt Democrats and helped Republicans. Truth was never a consideration.
And neither is it today.
“Two of the leading platforms responsible for censoring the bombshell New York Post Hunter Biden scandal stories before the 2020 presidential election are gearing up to censor free speech to combat so-called ‘misinformation’ ahead of the 2022 midterm elections,” the Media Research Center reported last week.
According to the MRC account, Facebook’s parent company Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter have “pledged to target ‘misleading narratives’ by suppressing election content they deem to be false, misleading, or dangerous.”
Meta has publicly acknowledged that it’s fielding a “dedicated team focused on the 2022 midterms to help combat election and voter interference,” and even indicated, says the MRC, “that government may even collude with the platform in censoring content.”
This conduct should be unprecedented in our republic. But it’s not. Since Joe Biden has occupied the White House, Democrats, who have tightly wrapped themselves around levers of power, have used private companies as government agents to censor speech they don’t like, as well as any discussion that threatens their plans to accumulate ever more political power.
In an admission that should have fueled widespread outrage, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last summer “we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook.” It turns out that the White House staff had been – and likely still is – “in regular touch” with social media platforms regarding posts about the coronavirus outbreak.
Earlier in 2021, congressional Democrats cornered executives communications giants such as Comcast and AT&T in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing and demanded to know what they were going to do about “the spread of dangerous misinformation.” This is not OK.
Rather than expose the collusion, the legacy media have instead gone along with the government’s agenda. The press doesn’t see another Watergate to be investigated, no gross violations of the First Amendment whose principles it claims to hold dear. It sees a government actively trying to wreck a political opposition that’s not in power in hopes that that opposition will never again put a candidate in the White House or hold a majority in either chamber of Congress.
When private companies act as government assets, they should be subject to the same consequences that the government is when it violates First Amendment rights. Civil rights attorneys should file lawsuits and the courts are obligated to sanction the offenders. The Democrats and their private-sector allies are playing a dangerous game. If they’re not stopped, there’s little to prevent them from not just dominating the federal government, but actually tyrannizing the opposition.
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