Last summer a Missouri judge ruled in a case brought by the state that the Biden administration had to cease contact with social media companies. This was addressing the charge that the president and/or his staff were engaged in the muzzling of expression on social platforms, regarding the pandemic as well as other topics. (The ruling was recently overturned by the Supreme Court, this June.)
The case followed revelations from the Twitter Files, the document release overseen by Elon Musk after taking over that company. In those documents it was established how the federal government has been involved in coercing social media to target and silent voices on their platforms, a clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Townhall specifically had been on the receiving end of this government effort to limit speech and control accepted narratives.
Zuckerberg letter via @JudiciaryGOP
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) August 26, 2024
Hunter Biden Laptop:
“It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story.”
COVID-19:
“…senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White… pic.twitter.com/BIoCe2UIZq
Now is a surprising but confirming admission, Mark Zuckerberg - the force behind Meta-FaceBook - has written a letter to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan on the House Judiciary Committee confirming the level of involvement the White House had in dictating approved speech on his platform. In the two-page letter, Zuckerberg lays out the process his site curtailed or eliminated exposure to certain content, on three segregated topics, at the urging of the Biden administration, and the White House specifically.
Regarding Covid/pandemic information:
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
Zuckerberg likewise indicated that topics involving Joe Biden’s involvement with the Ukraine outfit Burisma, and his son Hunter’s laptop were also considered subjects to be regulated by his company:
The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family.
The letter also explains the process that (then)Facebook employed, where it would shut down discussions on supposedly problematic content - specifically the laptop story - until fact-checkers would verify the accuracy or inaccuracy of the topic at hand:
We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again – for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the US while waiting for fat checkers.
This bold admission confirms what has largely been known to occur, and the suspected depth of involvement of our government in policing “approved” topics on social media. It also extends from another admission Zuckerberg made regarding the way his social platform was approached by the government.
As we covered at the time, two years ago Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that his company had been contacted by the FBI, in the summer of 2020, regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. The Bureau warned him that a story about the laptop would be dumped ahead of the election, alluding to it being Russian misinformation. This is what led to the stifling of any reports on the laptop, including the deplatforming of the New York Post accounts, as that was the news outlet willing to report on the accurate story. People were prevented from linking to the Post article and accounts daring to continue the discussion on the matter faced possible suspensions.
What made this all the more of government colluding on behalf of the Biden campaign is that the FBI knew full well at that time that the story was legitimate. FBI whistleblower revelations showed that inside the Bureau directions were handed out to smother the laptop story. Further laying out how the FBI is the source behind the “Russian disinformation” deflection campaign is the fact that the Bureau – while coaching social media to kill off what it called a fake intel effort – had taken possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop in December of 2019.
The FBI knew full well that the computer in question was legitimate, all while orchestrating the actions of Facebook and Twitter to kill off any discussion of the computer. Senator Ron Johnson, in a letter to the Justice Department Inspector General, alludes to the Bureau’s activities regarding the computer: “These whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election,” said the Republican senator.
All of this further cements the case that our government has been disturbingly active in working to muzzle and silence voices in this country. The common excuse made in the press (it is not censorship since private companies are policing their platform), falls apart when you see the direct coercion and instruction being commanded from the feds. This is our government declaring what type of speech is approved and sending notice on how it should be dealt with. The more that is learned of this the more we need to battle against the trampling of our Bill of Rights by the very entities that document was made to harness.