Sen. Cruz: White House Working With Facebook to Suppress COVID Postings is an ‘Absolute Abuse of Power’
(CNS News) – In reference to the Biden administration working with Facebook to suppress postings it considers “vaccine misinformation,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said “it’s an absolute abuse of power,” and that it is “dangerous” and “unconstitutional.”
At the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, CNS News asked the senator, “Should the Biden administration be able to work with Facebook to censor posts that it considers having vaccine misinformation?”
Senator Cruz said, “I think it is an absolute abuse of power. Big Tech is censoring American citizens and the Biden administration is urging them to do so; and it is dangerous, and it is unconstitutional.
Last week, the Biden administration admitted that it is working with Facebook to suppress certain posts on the social media platform that contain alleged “vaccine misinformation.”
When asked about the posts on July 16, Biden said, “They’re killing people. … The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people."
Also on July 16, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is “in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team, given, as [U.S. Surgeon General] Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.”
“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office,” said Psaki. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others, uh – if you – for providing misinformation out there,” she said.
Psaki then explained four suggestions the White House has given to Facebook and commented, “We engage with them regularly and they certainly know what our asks are.”
However, Psaki told CNS News during her press conference on July 19 that the White House has “not asked Facebook to block any individual posts,” but the Biden administration “certainly raised where we have concerns about information that’s inaccurate that is traveling out there in whatever platform it’s traveling on.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) commented to Psaki on Twitter, “Her statement makes it abundantly clear they want people banned for simply disagreeing with the government’s pre-approved narrative.”
Ben Shapiro: Lying About 'Misinformation' To Justify Tyranny
By Ben Shapiro | July 21, 2021 | 10:08am EDT
This week, President Joe Biden was asked whether he had any message for social media amidst a dramatic rise in the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases thanks to the delta variant. Biden immediately responded that companies like Facebook were responsible for murder: "They're killing people — I mean, they're really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people." Meanwhile, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that Facebook had not stopped misinformation thoroughly enough on its platform, calling misinformation a "serious threat to public health."
None of this is accurate. Facebook is, first of all, a platform; it is not a publication with the same responsibilities of editorial oversight as a publisher. To treat Facebook as such would be to transform its purpose. Furthermore, on a purely factual level, it is simply untrue that Facebook users are disproportionately likely to avoid vaccination — in fact, according to Facebook's statistics, vaccine acceptance in the United States among their users now stands between 80% and 85%, and 3.3 million Americans have used their vaccine finder tool to seek a location for a vaccine.
So, what's driving the Biden Administration's finger pointing? Its broader agenda to utilize the massive market dominance of the social media platforms to squeeze alternative media sources out of existence. Before the rise of social media, most Americans who used the Internet for news bookmarked a variety of pages and then visited them individually. Over time, as social media grew and as people began to access stories they liked through an algorithmically controlled newsfeed, Americans used social media for news. This centralized the mechanism for information dissemination.
Now, the left sees an opportunity: If all the news is accessed in one place, by restricting access in that place, the news monopoly once held by legacy media can be reestablished. All that will be required is labeling everyone they don't like "misinformation."
Kara Swisher of The New York Times, who has spent the past several years attempting to pressure Facebook into exactly such censorship, says as much openly. According to Swisher, Biden wasn't wrong to say Facebook was killing people. Actually, writes Swisher, the problem is that Biden restricted his analysis to the coronavirus: "Attempting to stop falsehoods by claiming to offer good information is like using a single sandbag to hold back an impossibly fetid ocean. It's like that when it comes to a range of once-anodyne, now divisive issues, from election integrity to critical race theory to whatever."
"Whatever." Literally any topic on which Swisher disagrees is now dangerous misinformation that must be curbed. This week, NPR went so far as to pressure Facebook to suppress traffic to my website, Daily Wire, on precisely this basis. NPR admitted that we don't print falsehoods, that we don't spread conspiracy theories, and that we are honest and open about our conservative perspective. So, why should we be suppressed? Because, according to NPR, we cover "specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda." And, quoting an expert, NPR reports, "If you've stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation."
There it is: even truth can be misinformation. And misinformation kills.
The authoritarianism of the left is in full swing. Americans must spot it and fight it before it destroys our ability to see anything other than that which the left wants us to see.
Ben Shapiro, 37, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers "How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps," "The Right Side Of History," and "Bullies."
ACLU: “Gov’t Cannot Be Trusted to Label ‘Truth’ or ‘Fiction’ Any More than Facebook or Twitter”
By Craig Bannister | July 21, 2021 | 10:37am EDT
Regardless of political party or platform, governments and social media giants cannot be trusted to decide what’s true or false or what speech should be allowed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warns.
Last Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that "misinformation" about the coronavirus is a "big issue," so "we've increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation."
“No matter which party is in power, the government cannot be trusted to label 'truth' or 'fiction' any more than Facebook or Twitter can,” the ACLU tweeted Tuesday, commenting on a CNN article titled “White House reviewing Section 230 amid efforts to push social media giants to crack down on misinformation.”
CNN reports that the White House is pressuring social media platforms to censor posts that the Biden Administration declares untrue by threatening to remove protections from liability for users’ posts:
“The White House is reviewing whether social media platforms should be held legally accountable for publishing misinformation via Section 230, a law that protects companies' ability to moderate content, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said Tuesday.
“The Section 230 debate is taking on new urgency in recent days as the administration has called on social media platforms to take a more aggressive stance on combating misinformation. The federal law, which is part of the Communications Decency Act, provides legal immunity to websites that moderate user-generated content.”
The First Amendment, not Section 230, is what protects social media companies from liability, ACLU concludes, citing declarations of “truth” by past administrations:
“Remember when then-President Trump claimed COVID would just 'go away' without a vaccine?
“Remember when President Obama told us that the NSA had not abused surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden?
“The president should know that it's not Section 230 that protects social media companies from liability for false information.
“It's the First Amendment.
“The Constitution protects people — and social media companies — from government censorship campaigns.”
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