Apparently, Joe Biden can't take a joke. Oh, and he also has contempt for the principle of free expression online.
Both these revelations were just confirmed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who on Monday evening blew the whistle on the Biden administration's attempts to pressure his company to censor content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—including "humor and satire." Zuckerberg confirmed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that they did make changes to their "enforcement" (read: censorship) in light of this pressure and that the White House expressed "a lot of frustration" with the company when their take-down demands weren't always met.
"I believe the government pressure was wrong," Zuckerberg wrote, "and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."
"We're ready to push back if something like this happens again," the CEO concluded. And it very well might, because the Biden administration evidently does not regret taking this approach.
"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety," the White House said in response to this story. "Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."
(Translation: We still think the government knows best and should get to dictate to companies what ideas Americans can express on their platforms.)
Ultimately, Zuckerberg's revelations just confirm what we already knew from the Twitter Files and other extensive reporting: that the Biden administration has used the might of the federal government (which has extensive regulatory and financial power over Big Tech companies) to pressure social media platforms to take down the otherwise First-Amendment-protected speech of American citizens.
This is a potential red flag on a legal and constitutional level, as the extent to which government pressure campaigns on private companies to take down Americans' speech, known as "jawboning," violate the First Amendment is an active legal question. It's currently working its way through the courts and it also depends on whether the government's actions were at all coercive or purely suggestive.
So, without many more details and further litigation, it's too soon to say whether the Biden administration's actions pressuring Meta to censor COVID-19 information—and even jokes!—actually violated the letter of the First Amendment. But we absolutely can conclude that they reveal a deeply misguided disdain for the general principle of free expression.
Think about it: During a deadly pandemic that claimed the lives of millions of Americans, the federal government spent time and money that could've gone toward public awareness, test availability, vaccine rollout, research, or reopening schools and the economy on ... trying to get jokes and the "wrong" information censored off social media. One clear problem with this is just the matter of utterly, utterly misplaced priorities. But more crucially, there's a fundamental arrogance behind Biden's actions that has aged incredibly poorly.
The Biden administration assumed that they were infallible "experts" and knew the "truth" about COVID-19, so much so that they sought to shut down anyone who contradicted them online. But government experts, like all human beings, are not, in fact, perfect or all-knowing. During the pandemic, experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci were wrong or inconsistent about everything from masks to social distancing to how COVID-19 vaccines worked to herd immunity to the "lab leak" theory of COVID-19's origins.
Yet they nonetheless sought to put their thumb on the scale to ensure that only their version of "the truth" could be expressed online.
It's no surprise that in some although certainly not all cases, those people spreading "misinformation" on Facebook have turned out to be, well ... right. For example, Meta—potentially due to the federal government's pressure—originally censored people who claimed COVID might have originated in a lab, calling it a "conspiracy theory." Now, it's considered an entirely legitimate theory that even the FBI thinks is the most likely cause of the pandemic.
If the Biden administration had gotten its way and fully squelched this "misinformation," we might never have evolved in our understanding of such a fundamental issue. This is just more proof that it's the free marketplace of ideas that leads to truth over time, not the imposition of one understanding from the halls of Washington, D.C.
You would think that the White House would've gained some humility from the pandemic era after making so many mistakes and maybe even realized its own fallibility. But if Biden's response to Mark Zuckerberg's revelations is anything to go by, the President's disdain for free expression online hasn't dissipated at all.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, co-founder of BASEDPolitics, and Tony Blankley fellow at the Steamboat Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
