Inside the silo of the "legacy media," they are alarmed that left-tilting government bureaucrats are being discouraged from telling social media platforms what speech they should suppress ... in the name of "democracy."
In 2020, these platforms crushed damaging stories about Hunter Biden and "conspiracy theories" about COVID emerging from a Chinese lab. It doesn't matter now that the "suppressed" side was correct, and the "misinformation" actually came from the Left. The Washington Post expressed alarm under the headline: "U.S. stops helping Big Tech spot foreign meddling amid GOP legal threats."
Notice the Biden gang and the leftist permanent bureaucracy are described as the "U.S.," like they're super-neutral. Reporters Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski began with: "The U.S. federal government has stopped warning some social networks about foreign disinformation campaigns on their platforms."
This alarmed the Censorship-Industrial Complex on the Left, who were also described super-neutrally as "researchers." The Post lamented, "For months, researchers in government and academia have warned that a barrage of lawsuits, congressional demands and online attacks are having a chilling effect on programs intended to combat health and election misinformation."
A series of "researchers" are quoted making the left-wing case. Their back-door control of the political narrative through the federal government is pawned off as "election integrity." If democracy is synonymous with the Democrats, then integrity is only assured by Democrat victory.
The Post duo warned, "The shift erodes a partnership considered crucial to the integrity of elections around the world -- just months before voters head to the polls in Taiwan, the European Union, India and the United States."
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Nowhere in this story did these scribes Naomi and Cat give the slightest clue they interviewed a conservative or a Republican outside their tight-knit circle of "researchers." All the quotes were united with the Post narrative, or what one supportive source called the "defender community." There's passing mentions of Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Jim Jordan, but no quotes.
Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was quoted as complaining that "legal warfare by far-right actors" has "led to a dire situation." He was referring to Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit by Republican attorneys general into how the federal government pressured Big Tech to suppress so-called misinformation that might prevent a full accounting of COVID origins or Biden family shenanigans in China and Ukraine.
It's a "dire situation" that judges ruled against the Biden administration pressuring social media giants to curtail anti-Biden expression. It's terrible that "far-right actors" have spurred "broad legal uncertainty" inhibiting their censorious impulses.
The Post pretended these were mere allegations, that the lawsuit focused on "ways federal officials allegedly pressured social networks to remove misleading posts about coronavirus vaccines and elections." Allegedly?? Everyone knows how pre-Musk Twitter suspended the New York Post account for 17 days and temporarily suspended accounts -- even liberal journalists -- who merely retweeted the tabloid's stories on Hunter Biden.
They weren't "protecting elections." They were protecting Democrats. Time magazine proclaimed after the successful suppression: "They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."
It's great news that the Big Tech-government partnership to "fortify" the election for the Democrats through censorship has been frustrated by Republican lawsuits and congressional hearings. If we had a slogan for what The Washington Post is fervently supporting here, it's ... "Democracy Dying in Darkness."
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
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