Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.
(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)
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The preliminary staff report is the result of a months-long investigation into the alleged coercion, where President Joe Biden’s White House reportedly pushed social media platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube, to censor books, videos, and posts.
Emails released Wednesday show Facebook officials chafed at the Biden White House pressure campaign to censor reports that the COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak in China.
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As the 2024 election heats up, now is the time for campaigns to invest wisely. Questions abound: Do you invest in cable news advertising? Door-to-door canvassing? Social media? Something else?
For answers, I look back to the past. In 2000, I oversaw the South Carolina Republican Party’s history-making effort to post real-time presidential primary results online. The election night vote-counting for the epic Bush vs. McCain battle played out on screens across the world – not just in the South Carolina GOP’s vote tabulation center. On that night, the ground shifted beneath our feet.
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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the censorship agency everyone has been talking about, has scrubbed its Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation (MDM) webpage, https://cisa.gov/mdm to remove any mentions of interacting with “appropriate social media platforms” to “route disinformation concerns”.
How malinformative, to use the agency’s jargon. Malinformation, per the agency, “is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” By removing mentions and the context of the agency’s stated history of interacting with social media platforms, the agency is apparently attempting to mislead, harm and manipulate the public into believing it never did those things in the first place.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) met weekly with large social media platforms to collaborate on moderating content, according to a deposition this week from FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan.
Chan, who was one of the two FBI agents who contacted Facebook ahead of its censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop warning of potential Russian disinformation operations, said that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials met weekly with social media companies to remove specific accounts ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to his deposition cited by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration for allegedly censoring Americans’ speech in the name of “misinformation” led by Schmitt and Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana.
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Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) leaders reportedly used their influence with social media platforms to censor reporting on the organization’s financial activities, according to New York Magazine.
Internal communications from a group chat called “BLM Security Hub,” which reportedly included members from BLMGNF and consulting firms with connections to the organization, appeared to show the foundation’s efforts to use its connections to push social media networks to remove negative content about the group, according to New York Magazine.
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Facebook is aware that Instagram, an image-sharing social media platform it owns, has harmful effects on the self-esteem of teen girls, according to leaked research seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Internal research, documents and research reportedly show that Facebook has studied the harmful effects Instagram can have on its users, especially teen girls, according to the WSJ.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one slide from an internal research report read, with another saying that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
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