Big Tech Isn’t A Victim In The Biden Regime’s Speech Crackdown, It’s An Eager Collaborator

A trove of documents obtained in part from a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — written up this week by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang at The Intercept — provides further proof that the government works hand in glove with the world’s biggest tech companies to remove, manage, curate, and otherwise censor what Americans can see and say online.

This isn’t a surprise. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said as much from the White House podium in July of 2021. Other documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests have added tangible evidence to her claim. But what makes this recent revelation significant is the extent to which the tech companies have been involved in developing government protocols, responding to government requests, and otherwise managing the cozy system by which the government uses the technology companies to police speech.

Facebook (which owns Instagram), for example, set up “a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on … and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.” Prior to the 2020 election, major tech companies ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn, Discord, and Verizon Media met monthly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, to discuss handling what they considered to be election misinformation. The platforms generated reports and “timely responses,” including the removal of reported misinformation,” at the request of the government.

Tech executives, including the former Twitter head of legal, policy, trust, and safety, Vijaya Gadde, served on government advisory committees and drafted a report to the DHS sub-agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, urging it to be more far-reaching in its efforts to shape the “information ecosystem” — that is, to be more aggressive in controlling the nature of what was said online as it related to “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”

In other words, this isn’t the government “bullying” or coercing the tech companies to do what they want. It’s a partnership between the federal government and the world’s biggest speech platforms to control the public conversation about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, Covid-19, elections, and whatever else the Biden administration, in collaboration with Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Wikipedia, among others, decides is “appropriate” for the public to see.

The ramifications here are clear. When the government seeks to control or influence speech through willing private companies, the constitutional protections afforded to Americans become moot. “It is axiomatic,” law professor Jonathan Turley told The Intercept, “that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.”

But for the government to so successfully subvert its constitutional restrictions requires two things: compliant tech executives and platforms powerful enough to actually control the discourse. The internecine debate on