In the latest entry in the “Democrats with Totalitarian Impulses” news, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has unleashed a Twitter broadside against Facebook/Meta and the Biden administration.

Here’s the thread. Read the whole thing; it’s worth the few minutes out of the day if you care at all about our continued liberty and Constitutional rights.

THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE

🧵 Thread:

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023

Rep. Jordan has been on the attack on this issue for some time now. In this thread, he has the receipts.

Jordan’s thread includes an email from April 2021 that states in part:

We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content. For example, we recently shared with the White House a list of the top 100 vaccine-related posts on FB in the U.S. for the week of 4/5-4/11. While authoritative information dominated the list, the White House was concerned that the #3 post was a vaccine discouraging humorous meme and they called on us to delete the meme.

It gets worse from there:

In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post. pic.twitter.com/5muflAQjcx

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023

In case anyone hasn’t been paying attention since about 1791, this is why the federal government has absolutely no power or business coercing Facebook to do any of this (emphasis mine).

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s important to note that the Executive Branch – that’s the branch controlled by the President, in case there are any Democrats reading this – can only enforce laws that are passed by Congress, and Congress is very clearly prohibited from abridging the freedom of speech. There is no qualification in the First Amendment stating the speech must be approved as accurate by some bureaucrat or elected official. There’s likewise no qualification stating “…except for corporations.”

Free speech means you have to let Nazis have parades. It means you have to let Antifa scream about “fascism” as long as they don’t block roads, loot, or set fires. It means that the worst as well as the best among us are allowed to state our minds, and the government is proscribed from interfering. Even the ACLU used to understand that.

Rep. Jordan seems to get it, and he’s not done holding Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta to account.

GOP members of the panel have accused Meta of not cooperating with its investigation into the company’s content moderation practices.

The committee announced Tuesday that it is slated to consider its report recommending Congress hold Zuckerberg for contempt during a Thursday session.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) launched an investigation in February into how tech companies communicate with the federal government. The vote Thursday comes after a series of hearings on the same topic from the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Rep. Jordan has gone after other social media companies as well and is examining information from them, looking for more such evidence of coercion from the Biden Administration.

Jordan subpoenaed executives from Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft about their communications with the federal government starting in February. Since then, the weaponization subcommittee has held numerous hearings about the subject.

Here’s the part that should make readers skeptical; it’s unclear at all what, if any, action Congress will take, as they have little enforcement ability other than a possible contempt charge that will be roundly ignored, or yet another strongly worded letter.

Strongly.

Worded.

Even so, the evidence uncovered so far is chilling. Granted, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, and the like are private companies and have every right to develop and implement their own editorial policies. But it’s disconcerting in the extreme that the federal government is putting pressure on these companies. It’s also disconcerting that Facebook, at least, appears to have just given in to the pressure when the correct response would be to direct federal bureaucrats to the First Amendment and tell them to butt the hell out.