Editors at National Review Online take aim at the Biden administration’s approach to social media policy.
In a letter to Representative Jim Jordan, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has apologized for his company’s decision to play along with the many requests for censorship that were made by the Biden administration during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee, “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.”
In June, in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on whether the Biden administration’s conduct had been unconstitutional. Irrespective, its behavior represents one of the worst political scandals of recent years. Per Zuckerberg, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook and Instagram to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire” and “expressed a lot of frustration” in the rare cases that it demurred. That, clearly, is not how the federal government should be behaving toward the free speech of its citizens. That those demands were made — and that resistance to them was treated as it was — is a sign that something went very wrong.
In a statement, the White House pointed to the existence of a “deadly pandemic” and cast its actions as having protected “public health and safety.” “We believe,” the administration submitted, that “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.” But, as Mark Zuckerberg confirmed, the Biden team’s habit went far beyond a desire to save lives. Confirming that Facebook had throttled accurate reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg apologized for that, too. “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” What, one wonders, would the Biden campaign claim was its unselfish justification for that?
