Leftists have been ignoring freedom of speech concerns for years over Big Tech’s censorship and censorship of Leftist voices. You see that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all private companies and can have any speech policies they wish. This argument is now gone since Elon Musk bought Twitter. It might have suggested that Musk can restore freedom of speech on his platform. Evidence is mounting that the FBI was involved in getting preMusk Twitter censor patriots. It may also be that the bureau violated the First Amendment by nudging Twitter into deep-six voices that it didn’t like. The question now is who can investigate the FBI. Is the FBI going to investigate?
It isn’t the first questionable act of the once unimpeachable and sterling feds. It has been a long journey from putting Al Capone behind bars, busting up Mafia, to participating in a sitting president’s frameup and investigating parents at school board meetings for “domestic terrors.” But that is the ugly legacy of Merrick Garland’s FBI. Fox News Digital reported Wednesday that the FBI asked Twitter to moderate certain speeches. This is a revelation made by constitutional experts who spoke to Fox News Digital.
Fox reports that Yoel Roth (ex-head of safety at Twitter) attended weekly meetings with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security about moderating misinformation before the 2020 election. This is the same Department of Homeland Security that set up the Disinformation Governance Board in order to limit speech further, until it was forced out of the office and to deep-six it over First Amendment concerns.
Remember that the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. This is to stop any group or individual from gaining the exact control that the Biden administration has been trying to achieve. One group can set the parameters of public discourse and place itself above criticism or scrutiny. It can establish a dictatorship, and no one can protest. The administration’s inexplicable concern about “misinformation”, and “disinformation,” is solely based on its decision to sell the ban on dissenting voices to Americans under the pretext of protecting them against those scourges.
However, “Misinformation” or “Disinformation”, like hate speech, are not quantifiable quantities. They are, however, very much in the eyes of the beholder. Already, we have seen how the media and political establishment used these labels to their advantage in handling the Hunter Biden story. It was false and Russian propaganda. But it turned out to be all true. This type of chicanery dates back to centuries ago when Galileo was forced to silence him for observing that the earth revolved around the sun. We should have known better and the nation has taken a tragic turn in which avowed enemies of the pillars of any free society now control almost everything.
Some indications have been given by the incoming Republican-majority Congress that it will investigate the FBI’s censorship players. A group of Republican legislators wrote Wednesday that the Committee Republicans would continue to investigate whether U.S. officials participated in the suppression and censorship of lawful speech in violation U.S. Constitution. There are reports that social media companies had acted at the request of officials and agencies when they removed, restricted, or claimed content.
The administration is responding by repeating the old “private company” line. Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, stated that it was up to private companies to take these types of decisions. “We weren’t involved. “I can confirm that we weren’t involved.” John Kirby, National Security Council strategic communication coordinator, also stated that Biden’s handlers weren’t “directing private social media companies how to manage their content.” These social media companies can decide how they want to manage their content.
However, this was a very different position from Jean-Pierre’s predecessor Jen Psaki’s last year, when she claimed that the Biden team was in “regular touch with social media platforms and those engagements typically occur through members of the senior staff as well as members of COVID-19 team… specifically on the pandemic.”
Fox noted that Hans von Spakovsky is a legal expert and that Twitter is a private platform that can moderate the content. However, he said that the First Amendment applies only to the government and that it prohibits the censorship of government agencies and entities. Not private actors. If a private company censors information based on coordination, cooperation, and direction from the government, it could be considered an agent of the government and may be found violating the First Amendment.
We would be so lucky if there was a federal agency that could investigate and is impartial, non-partisan, and non-corrupt.
