A deposition of an FBI official in the Missouri v. Biden censorship case last week showed the FBI was meeting weekly with social media companies to coordinate on suppressing information before the 2020 presidential election. The suit alleges a massive ‘censorship enterprise’ involving several federal agencies and dozens of Biden administration officials. The information suppressed included, among other things, COVID treatments and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The theory of the case is that these nominally private companies turned themselves into state actors, extensions of the government, in doing the government’s bidding in suppressing speech.
FBI official Elvis Chan testified in the deposition the FBI gave Twitter and other social media companies specific directions on what information to suppress and asked them to take down specific accounts, which the companies did. The meetings became more frequent as the election approached.
The FBI has defended its actions, saying it routinely supplies information about foreign influence to private companies and those companies decide on their own what to do with the information. But it’s not quite that simple. You’ve got left-wing companies only too happy to damage Trump and help Biden in the 2020 election. You’ve got the FBI in your office weekly telling you which accounts and stories to target. And you’ve got the FBI following up, asking if specific accounts and content were taken down. As for foreign influence, that suggests the FBI was peddling the phony-baloney narrative Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. To hear Twitter and Facebook tell it, the FBI prepped them to expect hacked information to come from the Russians. The Hunter Biden laptop story comes along and Facebook concludes it fit the pattern of what the FBI was describing. Twitter suppressed the story on the specious grounds it was hacked information when they had no evidence of that. This sounds more like ‘wink-wink-nod-nod’ than private companies exercising independent judgment. There’s enough here to conclude the FBI and other government agencies colluded with Big Tech to censor the free speech rights of Americans. Interestingly, Twitter’s deputy general counsel at the time, who advised the company to block the Hunter Biden laptop story, had previously worked for the FBI.
It’s still early days for this case – lots more depositions to go. Anthony Fauci also sat for deposition recently, painting himself as a hero for saving lives by coaching social media platforms to stamp out so-called ‘disinformation’ about COVID treatments. Which is funny, because Fauci is the source of a lot of bad information about COVID and the treatments he sought to suppress have been shown to be effective. But Fauci doesn’t want to debate the merits. He just wants to claim he ‘represents science’ and shut everybody else up. He is a perfect example of why we don’t want the government in the business of deciding truth for everybody.
Collusion between Big Tech and government officials extends beyond the Biden administration. The California Secretary of State coordinated with social media companies to censor and remove posts regarding the 2020 election that state officials did not like. A Democrat-controlled House committee asked cable companies to stop carrying news networks the Democrats disfavor. And, to bring the story right up to the present day, leaked emails revealed Arizona Secretary of State and now Governor-elect Katie Hobbs was in regular communication with Twitter telling them who to censor.
There’s a word for the combination of Big Business and Big Government. It’s called fascism, and it’s exactly the kind of concentration of power our Founders warned us about.
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