Big Tech’s ability to control the flow of information and limit who has access to it has always been troubling, but it became a legitimate cause for alarm last week when the White House casually admitted Biden administration officials are helping social media platforms decide who stays and who goes.
“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last Thursday, specifically referring to coronavirus “misinformation.” She then said social media companies should work together to ban users deemed problematic from all platforms.
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” she said.
This crosses a line. It is one thing to argue private tech companies have the right to moderate content as they see fit. But when the federal government starts colluding with those companies to moderate content it dislikes, it becomes impossible to hide behind the private sector defense, as National Review’s Phil Klein noted last week.
President Joe Biden doesn’t seem to care. He has emphasized this strategy, urging social media platforms to become more aggressive in deplatforming users who spread “misinformation,” and accusing the companies that refuse of “killing people.”
“They’re killing people … look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden said. “And they’re killing people.”
Biden tried to walk back this comment later while reiterating his main point: He still believes that he has the right to define misinformation and use Big Tech to punish anyone who disagrees with his definition.
What makes this even more disturbing is the fact that the government has spent the past year and a half proving that what it determines to be true is very frequently just wrong. Just 18 months ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci was insisting that COVID-19 posed a “minuscule” threat. He and several other public health officials downplayed airborne transmission and told us masks were ineffective against the coronavirus. The scientific community also dismissed hydroxychloroquine as a “dangerous” treatment against COVID-19 and wrote off the COVID-19 lab leak theory as nonsense.
On all of these counts, the experts have been proven wrong, and the “misinformation” ended up being correct. Yet under Biden’s definition of “misinformation,” anyone who questions incorrect expert opinion would have been silenced. In many cases, they were silenced. Social media companies admitted to suppressing content related to the lab leak theory, and all posts that mentioned hydroxychloroquine were hit with a “misinformation” warning. At the pertinent times, no one could reasonably prove that COVID-19 did not escape from a Wuhan lab or that hydroxychloroquine was not effective against the virus’s symptoms for at least some patients.
Biden does not get to decide what we can and cannot say, especially about controversial issues that can and must be debated. Neither does Big Tech, for that matter. What conservatives should do to prevent Biden from having his way is another question, but it is clear that if we do nothing, government officials will exploit Silicon Valley’s power and use it to enhance their own.
