Criticizing Biden Is a Pathway to Censorship

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

RedState writer Mike Miller wrote Thursday that “[a] group of former Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, and cyber officials are calling for a national security review of Congressional legislation against the monopolization of Big Tech [as] reported by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald on Wednesday… .”

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Their argument? Watering down Big Tech’s power to censor is a threat to national security.

Thanks to Media Research Center, we have some context around what Big Tech is censoring and, if we follow the logic, what those former intelligence operatives consider those national security threats to be. According to a new report from MRC, Big Tech has been putting the clamp down on critics of Biden at a rate of 646 times over the last two years. Discussion of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story makes a frequent appearance among the curated content.

Big Tech’s campaign to protect President Joe Biden and his agenda has continued unabated. The Media Research Center found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticized Biden on social media over the past two years. This included 140 cases of Big Tech censoring people over the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden story in late 2020.

MRC Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022. The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day.

The worst cases of censorship involved platforms targeting anyone who dared to speak about any subject related to the New York Post bombshell Hunter Biden story. The Post investigated Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings. Big Tech’s cancellation of that story helped shift the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. Twitter locked the Post’saccount for 17 days. In addition, Twitter slapped a “warning label” on the GOP House Judiciary Committee’s website for linking to the Post story.

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Other supposedly dangerous discussion involved those who talked about Biden’s role in the current inflation crisis.

Facebook censored Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, on March 15, simply for posting a video quoting Biden’s embarrassing statements on energy policy. Facebook placed an interstitial, or filter, over Heritage Action’s video, suppressing the post’s reach. The video showed Biden and officials in his administration explaining how his policies would cause gas prices to rise.

But, the MRC report notes, the largest category of verboten language had to do with Biden and his tendency to, ah, invade personal space.

But the largest category by far included users who dared to call out Biden’s notoriously creepy, touchy-feely behavior around women and children. The 232 cases of comedic memes, videos, or generic posts about Biden’s conduct composed more than one-third of CensorTrack’s total instances of users censored for criticizing the president.

The role of journalism has always been understood to be one of calling truth to power as a sort of extra check on government — the people’s check, if you will. But Big Tech platforms, while the playground of journalists, clearly don’t believe they operate under that rubric (and, let’s face it, most of mainstream journalism seems to be following that lead if not leading the charge).

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But for former intelligence analysts to declare any criticism of the sitting president (and just think back to the last four years of the Trump administration for comparison) somehow threatening enough to demand interference in a Congressional push to reign in Big Tech’s power is something straight out of a dystopian novel.

There’s been a great deal of grousing about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stripping a corporation of special privileges when that company attempted to interfere via a public relations campaign with legislation in that state. Aren’t former representatives of the intelligence apparatus defending businesses that censor speech behaving the same? If one bothers you, shouldn’t the other?

To be absolutely clear and fair, DeSantis stripping Disney of its extras seems to be leveling the playing field with other businesses in the state of Florida, while the defense of Big Tech would on some level at least seek to apply special protective favors to companies.

The point is, the left never even gets that far in its analysis because their desires are sophomoric and simple: they want speech they like amplified and speech they don’t like stricken from the record. Not to mention this strange push to pit the “authority” conferred on former members of government agencies against the ACTUAL authority Congress has to legislatively deal with potentially bad corporate actors. In that regard, DeSantis and Congress are more alike than different.

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Meanwhile, government flacks are starting to look more and more like the biased water carriers in the press.

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