White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki has admitted that the “Biden Administration” is coordinating with social media companies like Face Book and Twitter to ban users whom the administration accuses of spreading Covid “disinformation.” The White House flags posts that it thinks are disinformation and then sends those to the social media company on which the post appeared.
Obviously, this violates the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The Left has always responded to complaints about Leftist bias in social media by pointing out that these are “private companies” and hence free to regulate speech on their own platforms. The First Amendment is a guarantee only against state censorship, not a guarantee that private companies will provide everyone a platform for speech. That argument sounds reasonable but it ignores a couple of inconvenient facts:
1) the social media companies were given an exemption from defamation laws (§ 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and are being treated like common carriers, like, e.g., the phone companies, which do not attempt to regulate what is said over their lines. Private companies that edit content—including newspapers, television channels, etc.—do not have exemption from defamation laws. If Face Book and Twitter are going to selectively edit content to promote some narratives and silence others—and they clearly are doing that—they should not be given immunity from suit.
2) The social media companies have intentionally made themselves into the “public square,” the place where people go to read news and communicate a wide range of information and opinion, including political and religious speech, with others. Although the social media corporations did this for their own profit—to harvest their users’ personal data and sell it to marketers who then target users with personally tailored advertising—the fact remains that they have created what is essentially a public forum, and that forum really ought to be subject to first amendment protections.
Be that as it may, whatever merit the “private company” argument had is rendered moot by coordination between the government and the social media corporations. By acting on instructions from the government, those companies are acting as agents of the state and are subject to constitutional restraints.
The government cannot job out its censorship to private actors, and then claim that those private actors are not subject to First Amendment protections. For example, the police could not, in order to skirt Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, grab a private person off the street and say, “we don’t have a warrant, but since you’re a private citizen, you can break into that house, tell us what is inside, and seize what we want you to seize.”
The regime is justifying this blatantly unconstitutional censorship on the basis that Covid “disinformation” is “killing people.” But let’s consider their record on Covid.
They told us that the virus jumped to the human population from a “wet market” where people were eating bats, and for months they told us that anyone who said it came out of the lab was spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation. But we now know that it is almost certain that the virus originated in the Wuhan Virology Laboratory as a result of “gain of function” research, paid for in part by Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health and your tax dollars.
They told us that the lockdowns were to be for two weeks in the spring of last year to slow the spread and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. But Left-leaning governments have used near-permanent lockdowns as a political weapon to destroy their opposition: the self-employed and small businesses. Australia is using lockdowns to try to totally eradicate the virus on their island continent, but that obviously means that Australia can never again be open to the outside world, and only very rarely open to its own internal commerce.
They told us that lockdowns were about stopping the spread of the virus, but there is no evidence that they have any effect on the speed or severity of the pandemic. Sweden, which did not lock down, has had better results than Michigan (a very similar population and population density). which, under the execrable Gretchen Whitmer, implemented one of the most severe lockdown policies. Sweden ended with fewer deaths than Michigan. Google it and you’ll find an Internet filled with excuses for why Sweden did better than Michigan, because the media is all in for the ruling elites’ remorseless war, via lockdowns, on the middle class and independent businesses—anyone who cannot be controlled and might have voted for Trump.
They told at first that masks would not help because a cloth mask is essentially useless against viruses. Then they changed their advice, saying that we should mask up, and claimed that the previous advice was only because—China having cornered the market on PPE in anticipation of the pandemic they loosed on the world—there were not enough masks to go around. But the evidence that masks do anything to slow the spread of Covid is missing. A large-cohort study in Denmark showed no advantages to masking up. This was a 4,800-person randomized trial that took place in the spring and early summer of 2020, in Denmark. A nearly identical proportion -- 42 of 2,393 people (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 of 2,470 (2.1%) in the no-mask group contracted Covid. The difference was not statistically significant. At this point, the mask is just a political symbol that says, “I’m submissive to the communist Left and their globalist overlords.”
One of the most disgraceful things the Leftist alliance between government and social media has done is to trash all attempts to use older, safe, and inexpensive drugs like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid. But now there are many reports from treating physicians that these drugs are highly effective, especially if used early in the disease process. It is an inescapable conclusion from this that these older drugs were being rubbished because there was no money to made from them—and to de-emphasize therapeutics in order to push the experimental vaccine, on which there were hundreds of billions to be made.
The Leftist government-media alliance has downplayed the well-establshed age-stratified nature of Covid fatalities. Although the CDC lists over 300 deaths of children from Covid, a recent Johns-Hopkins study found that there were no childhood Covid deaths that were not accompanied by extremely serious co-morbities (e.g., Leukemia). The Left has downplayed the fact that children don’t get sick and don’t infect others because it wanted to reward its teachers’ union constituency with months, leading into years, of full pay for no work, or work-from-home (remote learning is not as effective). They’ve also downplayed the fact that the average age of fatalities is 78, which is also the life expectancy in the United States, because it obviously makes no sense to shut down the economy when working-age people are not the main victims of Covid.
The Leftist government-media alliance has downplayed the experimental nature of the vaccine, which has not been approved by the FDA but is being given under an Emergency Use Authorization.
The Leftist government-media alliance has not been willing to discuss adverse reactions, or side effects, to the vaccine, even though they are being reported by the thousands. VAERS has received 1,148 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis among people ages 30 and younger who received COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine is causing cardiovascular problems in young people—who do not need the vaccine because they are not at risk from Covid. VAERS also received 6,207 reports of death among people who received the vaccine, far more deaths, by orders of magnitude, than any other vaccine in American history.
Given this astonishingly bad record—this fire hydrant of lies, distortions, omissions and falsehoods—it beggars belief that the “Biden” regime is setting itself up as the sole arbiter of what is acceptable speech about Covid-19.
Needless to say, this has profound religious liberty implications. A government that brags about its prerogative to control speech and de-platform anyone it disagrees with is dangerous, especially since they so overtly despise religion and religious people. An administration this casual about traducing the First Amendment freedom of speech will have no qualms about violating First Amendment free exercise of religion—especially since it is Leftist doctrine that conservative views on sexuality have no religious legitimacy and are nothing but a thin cover for bigotry and hate.