On July 15, President Joe Biden’s Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, informed the American people that the Biden administration was working directly with one of the social media giants to “flag” posts that spread “disinformation.”
It should alarm every American citizen that the federal government is now sifting through Internet conversations and advising a social media platform on what can and cannot be published.
When tech giants illegally banned President Donald Trump and thousands of other American citizens, leftist apologists blithely explained, “They’re private companies, not the government, so they can do what they want.”
But when it’s the White House initiating the banning process, what’s the excuse for treading on the First Amendment now?
There can be no sound rationale for the government’s involvement in this limiting of speech. And what’s more galling is that it’s the Biden White House doing it.
The claim is that Biden is trying to protect the American people from potentially harmful information regarding COVID-19, which is a laugh, since both the president and his vice president openly disparaged the life-saving vaccines from the campaign trail when Donald Trump was still in office.
Remember that during the 2020 campaign, Biden questioned whether any vaccine under President Trump would even be “real,” and Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t take a vaccine that the Trump administration helped create.
So not only is the “flagging” of posts a flagrant assault on the bedrock American principle of free speech; it is ludicrous for the Biden administration to appoint itself the arbiter of truth.
But we are left with a scenario wherein the Executive Branch of the U.S. government is colluding with Big Tech to control the public discourse and silence opinions they don’t like.
This is un-American and it must be opposed. That’s where GETTR, a new “cancel free” social media app with over 1.5 million users already, comes in.
On GETTR, users from around the world can find the true marketplace of ideas, a place to share freedom and spread democracy. It is a direct challenge to Big Tech, Big Media, and by extension, Big Government. It is already becoming the place where competing ideas flow freely, and the response has been swift and strong.
Since launching July 4th, GETTR has quickly spread outside the borders of the United States., where free speech is also valued. While Americans are a plurality of the users, countries on every continent are represented, with Brazil being the largest international audience.
Had GETTR existed last year, there would have been an alternate platform for users to exchange ideas and competing views, in direct competition with the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
We all remember how discussion of the so-called “Lab Leak Theory” was silenced, when anyone who dared suppose that the virus did not spring from a bat or a wet market was hounded into submission.
And, always ready to tamp down an unacceptable point of view, Biden shut down a State Department investigation into the lab leak hypothesis early in his administration, according to CNN.
But of course, entertaining the possibility that the virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory is now an acceptable activity, and one that is newly approved for discussion.
And who can forget the curious case of the disappearing news of Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Just before the 2020 election, the New York Post ran stories about the laptop contents, which exposed Hunter Biden’s sketchy foreign business dealings and linked his father to the schemes. But the Big Tech wall went up.
Users were prevented from sharing them on social media, other posts were throttled, and the Post even saw its official account suspended for a time.
All of this was spurred by Biden’s campaign, which claimed – without evidence – that the laptop itself was a piece of nefarious “Russian disinformation.”
Today, of course, no one has made a dent in the accuracy of those laptop stories, though the social media giants silenced them just the same, with the approval and assistance of the Biden crew.
On GETTR, none of this would have happened. And anyone who values freedom of expression should open an account and try it.
As the White House has now entered into a marriage with a megacorporation to control the flow of public conversation, it underlines the truism that the federal government—whether under the control of Democrats or Republicans—must never have the power to regulate public discourse, silence dissent, and infringe on the bedrock principle of free speech in America.
Come to think of it, maybe we should have something in the Constitution about that.
Oh, wait…
Jason Miller is a former top advisor to President Donald J. Trump during both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and is the Chief Executive Officer of the social media platform GETTR.