For years now, Leftists have waved away freedom of speech concerns over Big Tech’s censorship of voices that dissent from the Left’s agenda. Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest are all private companies, you see, and so they can set any speech policies they want. Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, that argument has been consigned to the dustbin of history, as it might suggest that Musk is free to restore the freedom of speech on his platform. But evidence is piling up that the FBI was actively involved in getting pre-Musk Twitter to censor patriots, and it may be that the bureau really did violate the First Amendment in nudging Twitter to deep-six voices it disliked. Now the question is: who can investigate the FBI? Will the FBI investigate itself?
This is not, after all, by any means the first questionable activity of the formerly sterling and unimpeachable feds. It’s a steep descent from putting Al Capone behind bars and busting up the Mafia to participating in the frame-up of a sitting president and investigating angry parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” but that’s the ugly legacy of Merrick Garland’s FBI. In light of that, it’s no real surprise that, as Fox News reported Wednesday, “the FBI may have may have violated the First Amendment by asking Twitter to moderate certain speech, as revealed in a recent ‘Twitter Files’ release, constitutional experts tell Fox News Digital.”
Fox notes that “a Twitter Files installment released by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi last week revealed Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, apparently attended weekly meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence about moderating misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.” That’s the same Department of Homeland Security that set up a Disinformation Governance Board to restrict speech even further until it was forced to retreat and deep-six the Board over First Amendment concerns.
It should be remembered that the freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution in the first place in order to prevent any individual or group from getting precisely the kind of control over the public discourse that the Biden administration is repeatedly trying to attain. If one group can control the parameters of the public discourse or place itself beyond criticism or scrutiny, it has a free hand to establish a tyranny, and no one can utter even the smallest murmur of protest. All the administration’s faux-high-minded concern about “misinformation” and “disinformation” is based wholly and solely upon its decision to try to sell the banning of dissenting voices to the American people under the banner of protecting them from those scourges.
“Misinformation” and “disinformation,” however, like “hate speech,” are not objectively established quantities. On the contrary, they’re very much in the eye of the beholder. We have already seen the political and media establishment’s cynical use of these labels for its own advantage in the handling of the Hunter Biden story, which was false (and Russian propaganda to boot) until it suddenly turned out to be all true. This kind of chicanery goes back centuries, to the days when Galileo was forcibly silenced for daring to note that the earth moved around the sun and before that as well. But by now we should know better, and the nation has come to a sad turn that avowed foes of the pillar of any free society are now running nearly everything.
The incoming Republican-majority Congress has given some indications that it is going to investigate the FBI’s censorship chicanery. A group of Republican lawmakers wrote Wednesday: “Committee Republicans continue to investigate whether U.S. government officials have participated in suppression and censorship of lawful speech in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Reports continue to surface that social media companies acted on behest of government agencies and officials when removing, restricting, or disclaiming content.”
In response, the administration is repeating the tired “private company” line. “It’s up to private companies to make these type of decisions,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “We were not involved. I can say that we were not involved.” National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby likewise declared that Biden’s handlers were not “directing private social media companies on how to manage their content. It’s up to these social media companies to determine how they’re going to manage their content.”
This was, however, quite a different stance from the one that Jean-Pierre’s predecessor Jen Psaki took last year when she boasted that the Biden team was “in regular touch with social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff and also members of our COVID-19 team … specifically on the pandemic.”
Fox notes that, according to legal expert Hans von Spakovsky, “while Twitter is a private company that is free to moderate content, the company could be viewed as an agent for the federal government if it is found to be taking its direction.” He explained: “The First Amendment applies to the government and prohibits censorship by government agencies and entities, not private actors. However, when a private company is censoring information based on direction, coordination and cooperation with the government, then legally it may be considered to be acting as an agent for the government, and it may be found to be violating the First Amendment.”
Now if only we had an unimpeachable, non-partisan, non-corrupt federal agency that could investigate.
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