Last week, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an extensive report exposing the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech platforms to censor Americans’ protected speech online. The report is further confirmation that the Biden administration has engaged in a colossal campaign to stifle information that it disagrees with. And it did so by strongarming Big Tech companies into censoring their users.
Here’s what you need to know about the report:
1) The report proves that the Biden Administration coerced Big Tech companies into censoring speech.
This report detailed the Biden White House’s extensive campaign to control content and information that it disagreed with, particularly about COVID-19. Biden officials threatened and coerced Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon to shut down content that wasn’t in line with the government-approved narrative, especially those related to vaccine efficacy.
Attached to the report are hundreds of pages of internal company emails that show Big Tech employees knew they were doing the White House’s censorship bidding and felt they had no choice but to comply. These companies acknowledged internally that they didn’t want to jeopardize their businesses by not obeying the Biden administration, so they did what they were told.
By September 2021, all three companies had adopted new content-moderation policies that were designed to remove or reduce visibility of viewpoints that were disfavored by the Biden White House.
Simply put, the Biden administration was in control of the information we had access to online.
2) The report details just how wide-reaching the Biden Administration’s censorship campaign was.
This censorship campaign went beyond just taking down critical posts. For example, Biden officials were so obsessed with narrative control that they flagged satirical articles and memes that were poking fun at the COVID-19 vaccine in order to prevent vaccine hesitancy. Even worse, one Facebook employee said the Surgeon General specifically asked them to remove factually accurate information about vaccine side effects.
The Biden White House was literally trying to change facts and shut down jokes in an effort to push its policy agenda.
The report also revealed that the Biden administration pushed Amazon to censor books. After conversations with Biden officials, Amazon implemented a new policy that added a “Do Not Promote” label for certain books that challenge the government-approved orthodoxy about vaccines.
Think about that: the Biden administration was trying to ban books it disagreed with.
3) The Supreme Court has the chance to end this censorship regime.
The Committee’s report revealed the breathtaking scope of government censorship campaigns in recent years. The Biden White House knew it couldn’t shut down speech directly without raising constitutional concerns, so it pressured these companies to do it instead.
But this is still unconstitutional.
Coercion and significant encouragement by the government to censor protected speech is still government censorship. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month about this very issue in Murthy v. Missouri. The Center for American Liberty has a parallel case pending before the Supreme Court (O’Handley v. Weber) about government censorship at the state level.
The Supreme Court has the chance to make it clear that government coercion and significant encouragement of social media companies to censor Americans’ speech violates the First Amendment. The Court should take this opportunity to reinforce our national tradition of strong constitutional protections for free speech and dismantle the censorship-industrial complex so this does not happen again.