Democrats protect voting rights by skipping town to thwart a vote, rescue the economy by paying people not to work, and fend off “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” by proposing legislation that makes voter fraud easier.
In this upside-down world, they also shield the public from “misinformation” by colluding with tech giants to suppress news and opinion they don’t like.
I wrote recently about social media arrogantly and inexpertly “fact-checking” competent journalists. Prompted by their left-wing biases and by Democrats hyping foreign election interference, these guardians of truth are hurtling toward control of what Americans read, say, and think.
The notion that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon protect us from lies is evidently ludicrous to anyone who has spent time online. Even if it was once their aim, it’s not what they’ve achieved. For example, they suppressed discussion of COVID-19 coming from a virology lab in China and instead promoted the probable falsehood from official sources that the virus leapt naturally from bats to humans in a nearby market.
Now, at last, senior administration officials have caught up with the rest of us and suspect a lab leak. This means that for a year, instead of protecting us from misinformation, social media made misinformation the only thing the public was allowed to see and consider.
It would be bad enough if this manipulation was confined to matters of public health, but it isn’t. When the New York Post broke preelection news that Hunter Biden’s computer was loaded with inculpating evidence of shady business deals, with Joe Biden being the “big guy” who’d take a cut, Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story. Twitter suspended the Post’s account.
So we know that Big Tech is run by left-wingers (99% of money given by Twitter staff in the 2020 election cycle went to Democrats), the Democratic Party demands it censor more content, not less, it suppressed news and opinion that contradicts the left-liberal narrative, and what it suppressed was the truth.
It gets worse. Perhaps the most shocking development is that the White House recently admitted that it contacts social media companies directly about content to black out. That’s worth repeating. The executive branch of our federal government singles out stories, commentary, video, etc., to be killed by people who control access to information and debate about matters of public interest.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “We are regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health.” Then she went yet further, saying, “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”
The Biden administration is colluding with ideological allies and powerful partisan supporters to deep-six what it doesn’t want the public to see. By proposing that alleged malefactors be banned from all sites at once, it confirms that this isn’t about private sector businesses making separate decisions to compete in a free market but a program of orchestrated censorship.
I’ve always sympathized with the argument that government should leave private businesses alone and not regulate speech, and also, to a lesser extent, with those who argue that people who don’t like social media companies’ content decisions should build their own platforms to compete. But when Parler tried that, Amazon canceled its web hosting contract and put it out of business. And Psaki has now made the nonintervention argument redundant. What force it had depended on there being a wall between government and private business.
But it’s plain that government is already regulating speech via private sector supporters with a stranglehold on communication. Governing involves choosing, often between two desirable but mutually exclusive policies. It was once possible to argue that this one pitted free markets against free speech. But it’s not a market. It’s crony-capitalist collusion. Democrats treat Big Tech handsomely and, in return, get unhelpful information and arguments expunged.
The case against some form of regulation is faltering. President Joe Biden appears to be continuing a shift toward antitrust enforcement begun by President Donald Trump after years of neglect by President Barack Obama. But his focus will be only on business competition, not the competition of ideas. Democrats love their ideological alliance with business and have no incentive (other than the national interest) to act.
Republicans should get ready for reform. One idea might be to set a threshold of perhaps 100 million users, above which platforms would be banned from removing content except for narrowly constrained reasons, such as incitement of violence. One side of the partisan and ideological divide cannot be allowed to control political discussion. Americans are used to freedom. They will reward the party that secures it.
