The Censorship Industrial Complex Is US Government Counterpopulist Blowback
Mike Benz on the U.S. government’s role in creating the global war on free speech
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The claim by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance during his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz that Vice President Kamala Harris "is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale” was false, according to Politifact. That’s because “the Biden administration’s efforts to contact platforms about social media posts weren’t censorship unless they crossed the line into coercion,” which they didn’t do, explained Politifact.
A Columbia University political science professor told Politifact that “attempts to limit the spread of dangerous or false information pertaining to election results or vaccines’ efficacy during a pandemic ‘is not a threat to democracy.’”
In fact, contrary to Politifact’s claims, preventing people from criticizing elections on the Internet undermines our democracy. The public’s ability to exercise free speech and question election results or procedures is something that ensures our elections are free and fair.
And even Politifact had to acknowledge that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter in August to the House Judiciary Committee where he said the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor certain COVID-19 content.
PolitiFact waved away this letter by noting that the Supreme Court ruled that federal employees pressuring social media companies to remove posts was not unconstitutional. It quoted Justice Amy Coney Barrett who wrote, "The evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment."
But the Court did not consider the US government’s pressure of Meta or many other cases of government demands for censorship. And ultimately the Court dismissed the case on standing.
Why did Politifact get it so wrong? Perhaps because, as Politfact explained in its article, it “partners with Meta on its fact-checking program to slow misinformation’s spread.”
In other words, Politifact is part and parcel of the Censorship Industrial Complex we have documented over the last two years.
In truth, governments are waging war on free speech. Australia is at risk of passing sweeping censorship legislation in November. The Irish government has abandoned its hate speech legislation for this term, but governing parties are promising to bring it back. And the European Union is well on its way to implementing the most aggressive censorship agenda in the West.
And, over the last three weeks, one of the world’s most influential and largest billionaires and philanthropists, Bill Gates, and two recent Secretaries of State, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have all made strong calls to censor the Internet of wrongthink. Gates’ new Netflix show is called “What’s Next?” and he demands AI-powered censorship, ostensibly, of online harassment and wrongspeech on vaccines.
