(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) The top echelons of the Biden administration have been aggressively and successfully colluding with the titans of social media platforms to censor any content that questions, challenges, or contradicts the regime’s favored COVID policies and narratives, according to court filings made public this week.
Discovery evidence in the case of three states and four private plaintiffs who are suing the Biden administration for free speech violations revealed “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,’ which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies” that have colluded with the likes of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to censor speech, according to Aaron Kheriaty, MD, one of the plaintiffs being represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
“The third-party social-media platforms, moreover, have revealed that more federal agencies are involved,” Kheriaty wrote at his substack Human Flourishing.
“Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials—including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the White House—have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants.”
YouTube disclosed 11 federal officials who have engaged in such behavior, and Twitter disclosed nine, including senior officials at the State Department.
Confirming that this is the most dangerously anti-free speech administration in American history AND that Facebook (or Meta or whatever) is nothing but an appendage of the US deep state https://t.co/jJbDNTQhEm
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 1, 2022
At least 50 top officials in the Biden administration are identified as actively working to censor and suppress free speech on social media platforms, according to the filings.
“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased,” Jenin Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance said in a statement.
“The shocking extent of the government’s involvement in silencing Americans, through coercing social-media companies, has now been revealed.”
They work with Big Tech giants to censor their opponents and then call us the semi fascists
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 1, 2022
Court documents showed former White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the censorship activities included “members of our senior staff.”
“Secretary Mayorkas of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring ‘across the federal enterprise,’” court filings stated.
“These federal bureaucrats are deeply embedded in a joint enterprise with social-media companies to procure the censorship of social-media speech.”
The filings continued:
Officials at HHS routinely flag content for censorship, for example, by organizing weekly “Be On The Lookout” meetings to flag disfavored content; sending lengthy lists of examples of disfavored posts to be censored; serving as privileged “fact checkers” whom social-media platforms consult about censoring private speech, and receiving detailed reports from social-media companies about so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation” activities online.
The “private company” argument is dead. https://t.co/Q0qPfzPAkb
— Brandon Gill (@realBrandonGill) September 1, 2022
The court filing laid out several chilling examples of how the censorship and suppression process worked:
For example, after President Biden publicly stated (about Facebook) on July 16, 2021, that “They’re killing people,” a very senior executive at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) reached out to Surgeon General Murthy to engage in damage control and appease the President’s wrath.
Soon thereafter, the same Meta executive sent a text message to Surgeon General Murthy, noting that “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” and expressing that he was “keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively.”
That “deescalation” and “working together collaboratively,” translated as “increasing censorship on Meta’s platforms.” “One week after President Biden’s public accusation, on July 23, 2021, that senior Meta executive sent an email to Surgeon General Murthy stating, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen….
The collusion and coercion spanned multiple levels of the Biden administration, all following the same pattern:
Such communications from the White House impose maximal pressure on social-media companies, and they clearly get results when it comes to censorship.
And federal officials are fully aware that such pressure is necessary to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship.
CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] Director Jen Easterly, for example, texted with another CISA official about “trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand the mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful,” and complained about the Government’s need to overcome the social-media platforms’ “hesitation” to working with the government: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.
