Recently, I spoke at an event about my book, “The Indispensable Right,” at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Appearing on the panel with me was a New York University professor and one of the Facebook board members directing “content moderation.” We had a sharp disagreement over the record of Meta/Facebook on censorship, which I described as partisan and anti-free speech. Now, Congress has released the internal communications at Facebook, showing an express effort to appease Biden officials by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
In a new report released by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, Facebook executives are shown following the lead of the FBI, which gave them prior warnings to prepare to spike such stories before the election. The FBI knew that the laptop was authentic. They had possession of the laptop, and American intelligence concluded that it was not Russian disinformation.
One Microsoft employee wrote, “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,”
However, these communications also show a knowing effort to appease Biden and Harris and effectively assist them in their election efforts. Facebook’s then-Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg reportedly wrote to Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, “[o]bviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”
One of the most interesting communications came from a Facebook employee who recognized that they would be accused of seeking to influence the election: “When we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it.”
The Facebook files go beyond influencing the election. At one point, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, asked, “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made.” The Vice President in charge of content policy responded, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”
Notably, Democrats opposed every effort to seek this information, and Facebook only recently relented in turning over its files years after Elon Musk ordered the release of the “Twitter files.” I raised this issue during the NCC event to counter the glowing self-appraisal of Meta over its record. Despite its claims of transparency, it refused calls from many of us for years to release these files. When finally forced by the House to do so, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a perfunctory apology and moved on. As shown at the NCC event, it is now spinning its record as a defense of free speech.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
My local auto mechanic says “you can pay me now or pay me later”.
Trump says “let me collect your garbage or double your trash back”.
Facebook does not build state-of-the-art data centers for people to trade photos of what they had for dinner or cute puppy pictures. That is part of it, especially gathering information, facial recognition, personal habits and selling use of these powerful data centers to large businesses to banking and government for data mining.
The advertising pays part of the operating expenses but there is a deeper use of this operation.
There are rare few individuals who do not already have a data imprint of their face and their daily habits. During my most recent trip abroad, my face scan was required for my visa. My face was scanned before getting on the plane, my passport was scanned to get a ticket to have my face scanned to enter customs and I had to pass through one more customs station. Working were randomly perusing the airport.
Now, all the app driven appliances are collecting personal data. We are in uncharted territory.
Working dogs not working
Goebbels must be so jealous of the Obama/Biden administration.
If Trump wins, I think he should set up a “non working” facsimile of the Guillotine in front of the Dept. of Justice. Several baskets should be lined up to the side, apparently ready to use. Nothing else and no comments. Could leave a Garbage Truck there also. Just wonder what the response would be.
GEB,
What the response would be? Why, the leftists would have a meltdown! It would be all over MSM. The shriking, the angst. The wild accusations of exterminations. We are already seeing that now with the wild accusations ordinary Americans are going to get rounded up. Inter-racial relationships broken up and the non-white person deported. Look at the reactions from news outlets not endorsing anyone. They are in a panic.
A simple act that ANY employee/manager/owner of Facebook (no wonder they changed their name), the former Twitter or any similar organization that participated in these government censorship activities can do so as to cope with their actions and achievements in life:
Affix to your bathroom mirror a sign that is to be read out loud every time you use the bathroom for the rest of your unnatural life. The sign must be in bold lettering and positioned such that it sits immediately above your image in the mirror. The wording must be these exact four words and nothing more: “I am a stooge”.
If you learn to think AND carry out this ritual faithfully, you might achieve some insight into your pathetic state before your expire.
I wonder if the populace will get it. The government is involved with information suppression. Facebook is working with the government on suppression. Why listen to anything they say now? We know it is not balanced or maybe even accurate. If the emails are accurate, this shows bias and that means they are not just a platform, but a moderator influencing potential outcomes. Not good.
In this, the level of support for the Democrat slate is evidence that the heeding of George Santayana’s wise counsel is biased and remains a function of whose ox is being gored.
“We shouldn’t have done it.”
That says it all right there.
Citizens have the right of innocence until proven guilty, for governments and social media it is the opposite.
Let us recognize and remember that it was Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray and the FBI that perpetrated and re-enforced the fraud!!!
You forgot Blinkin
Once again, Jonathan misperceives the essential difference between censorship (blocking dissemination of information) and proactively pushing out an alternative reality (public fraud). In this post I’ll explain why the distinction is crucial to a culture of trustworthy free speech. Getting the lesson of Hunter’s laptop wrong sends us down a blind alley for years to come.
Most exasperating is that one of our top Constitutional lawyers, the person many look to for a legal strategy in the future to prevent similar con-jobs on the American voters (hatched by CIA professionals trained in PsyOps and intent on tilting a Presidential election) — can only offer flaccid solace. His interminable hand-wringing over the details of who was plotting what at FB, Twitter and FBI can be summed up in four words — complaining after the fact.
The mental block is laid bare in “The Indispensable Right”. JT thinks that freedom of speech goes as far as allowing intentional deception for political effect. He casts the net wide because the intent of the speaker is political. He makes no distinction about whether the actor casting the falsehood is a powerless, frustrated chump with pent-up grievances — or a powerful, professionally-trained ex-intel-agent interfering with a Presidential election. In fairness, JT never defends Biden-Blinken-Morrell as exercising their free speech rights under 1A in pushing out their “earmarks of Russian hacking” whopper — his argument for confronting inauthentic speech with mere rebuttal builds on examples where the speaker is small, frustrated and powerless. Of course, he’s correct that govt. prosecution of such a person is wrong and will backfire as an overreach.
Yes, 1A forbids govt. censorship. But in doing so, does 1A give the most powerful, skillful, conniving, media-savvy the unfettered legal right to dupe the public for sake of gaining/maintaining political power? If not, what legal toolset does the citizenry have as a counter-measure? (Hint: something other than prosecution, but involving courts, subpoena, and jurors as deciders-of-fact).
The legal thinking here needs a ton of work, guided by moral clarity. If all we have is complaining after the fact in regards to public frauds of high consequence (whether to go to war?, who to elect as leaders? ), what lies ahead for us is a complete unravelling of the trust that glues together a free society. What we can expect are a series of colossal blunders, where the truth finally emerges too late to matter. These mistakes will be irreversible. Hand-wringing galore. God will not favor a nation that has lost its moral differentiation between truth and artful falsehood in the public square.
We deserve more.
pbinca, I appreciate your sincerity here. Allow me to make a sincere rebuttal:
if we held ALL the powerful accountable for deliberate and substantive deception, the Democrat Party would go extinct. That is not debatable. Half the federal government would be under constant indictment.
So if we exempt the politicians and bureaucrats, what is the point?
We already know what would happen if public officials were exempted from deception laws. They’re already exempted from financial laws that apply with criminal penalties to every business. Presto! $35.8 trillion in federal debt.
Would these same laws apply to counsel in trials involving anyone deemed powerful or privileged? If so, that would require a massive bureaucracy just to call balls and strikes. That is simply not practical.
Everybody lies. You have to hope the lies eventually cancel out. We’ll find out in November if that holds true.
Cheers 🙂
Thanks, Diogenes. My model is defamation law. We’ve seen it work in many important cases, e.g., Nicholas Sandmann vs CNN/WaPo, Sandy Hook parents vs. Alex Jones, Dominion Voting Systems vs. Fox News. There are hundreds of smaller successful cases we never hear about. The big cases I mentioned have changed media behavior — but since media can still push out lies where nobody is being defamed by the lie, it doesn’t look like much has changed.
Yes, Public Frauds lawsuits could be waged against government officials, and candidates and campaigns. The whole point is to discipline the most powerful, media-savvy actors and their media allies from taking up intentional deceptions for political effect. Where was any exemption for public officials mentioned?
The political parties aren’t going to disappear because the law changes…they are forced to adapt. People like Marc Elias and Mike Morrell cannot afford to be sued for all they are worth. If we can get Congress to pass Public Frauds law without loopholes, the big-time partisan political hacks will adapt….to the benefit of the public and the trustworthiness of the public square.
Public Frauds lawsuits as a check on hatching political whoppers does need some refinement. The lawsuits would need to be fast-tracked to have the deterrent effect — e.g., Mike Morrell publishes the “51 Spies that Lie” letter, and is hit with a lawsuit and subpoena (compelled deposition) within a week. There’s also a threshold question: How to keep the Courts from being deluged with minor, frivolous cases (Judge can summarily dismiss, or maybe make that too expensive?) The devil is always in the details.
I appreciate sincere feedback.
Honestly, I wasn’t that thrilled with the outcomes of Sandy Hook and Fox. Looked like lawfare to me.
* moral authority? What does that mean?
Let’s not forget the over FOUR HUNDRED MILLION dollars Zuckerberg donated to “facilitate” the election due to COVEED… seriously… this had as much to do with anything else on how this election was RIGGED from the get go.
If you’re against Zuck bucks in 2020, then you’re also against Musk bucks in 2024, right? What do you propose?
Congress overruling the Citizens United decision with a new campaign finance law? Griping alone isn’t going to do anything….billionaires are not looking for your approval.
* Good that the congressional committee is investigating.
Good — but only if it leads to changes in the law that deter the intentional duping of the voters for political advantage — because under current law, there is no legal way to challenge deceitful political infowarfare (unless someone is defamed). Meaning: the cover-up of Hunter’s laptop orchestrated by CIA-FBI-social media was perfectly legal, and similar professionally-crafted dupes will continue until their originators and their media-spreaders can be sued for Public Fraud.
Showboating by a Congressional Committee doesn’t solve the problem.
* it’s not showboating but some use it to grandstand.
Programs such as the The View or Jimmy Kimmel are campaign contributions certainly. MSM is overwhelmingly campaigning contributions and that includes FOX and others. Newspapers, mags and radio , too. It seems it all sells until people un-subscribe. The approach appears to be commerce.
Look at the caliber of people in public office. Business people have better things to do than serve for 4 years or 6 years. The professional incorruptible legislator went the way of the Dodo? These guys are actually robbing the poor.
Like your comment
No, they are not campaign contributions, because they are not done at the campaign’s behest. They are exercising their own first amendment right to try to persuade voters as they think right. Each person has that right, and there can be no limit on it. The only thing Congress can regulate is actual contributions, which by definition are things given to an actual campaign. The View campaigning for Harris is not a contribution; but if the Harris campaign asks them to do something for which they usually charge money, and they do it for free, then that’s a contribution.
Oh no! Another billionaire stands up to cancel pressure! So what will happen, people will not read his paper? They are already doing that now. What nobody ever seems to understand that there is a section for opinion, it is called the editorial page.
So imagine the idea of reporting the news and not a slant on the news with opinion. These newspapers are preaching to a smaller and smaller audience because nobody wants to listen to a daily diatribe.
Good for Elon Musk and good for Jeff Bezos.
If there’s any retribution to be administered it would seem FB is in the lineup.
There should be an investigation to reveal who in Congress and the FBI were directly and knowingly involved and directed this laptop debacle. This is corruption at the highest levels of government and must be dealt with. May only happen if Republicans take both the House and the Senate. The laptop was validated by eye witnesses within months of being discovered. From Feb. 2023… “The FBI “verified” the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in November 2019 and a federal computer expert assessed “it was not manipulated in any way,” IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told Congress in explosive testimony. Investigators probing President Biden’s son for tax fraud and other crimes were not given full access to the laptop’s contents, however, Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee during his May 26 deposition. “The computer guy said that they could do a CSV list that shows when everything was created … the whole discussion was about can we rely on this information on the laptop, is it Hunter Biden’s? And their opinion was, it was, and it was not manipulated in any way,” he said. Shapley confirmed key details in the chronology of the laptop, whose existence was first reported by The Post in October 2020 but dismissed as a “Russian plant” by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The laptop’s contents linked Joe Biden to his son’s dealings, including in China and Ukraine — contradicting his public claims he never discussed business with his son Hunter or brother James Biden. Despite the FBI’s internal corroboration, 51 former US intelligence agency leaders signed a pre-election letter saying that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until well after Biden won the 2020 election, with the Washington Post and New York Times saying only in March 2022 that they had confirmed the authenticity of files. The filter team included IRS and FBI agents as well as Justice Department attorneys. It’s unclear from the testimony when exactly that process was conducted and investigators were discouraged from viewing press reports on the device to ensure they only viewed verified information. Some emails were withheld, Shapley said, because Hunter’s attorney George Mesires was cc-ed. One email chain was between Hunter and his associate Eric Schwerin, a key figure in the Biden family’s business dealings. “They basically claimed privilege,” Shapley said, “on a huge amount of information.” https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/fbi-verified-authenticity-of-hunter-bidens-abandoned-laptop-in-november-2019-irs-whistleblower-gary-shapley/
* Yes, it looks like that 🐙 has tentacles. Imagine having Vindman near a presidency. Israeli info has now been leaked?
Facebook, Justice Department and half of both houses of congress.
Retribution….is that a legal term?
It is the antonym of reparations. Meaning the illegal, immoral, and politically beneficial taking of funds from a political enemy, where as reparations is illegal, immoral, and politically beneficial giving of funds to a political ally.
* Perhaps there’s an appointed minister of media? Looks like it.
The most shocking thing I learned about Facebook is that in Virginia, Dominion Power shares your name, address and phone number with Facebook to sell you targeted ads, unless you opt out. See Dominion Energy “Virginia Social Media Opt-Out”
We should not be attacking censorship of the truth. Censorship of the truth is a vital activity of our functioning Criminal Deep State and shields the obedient hoi polloi from facts that don’t comport with official Deep State narratives. Free speech, of course, should be encouraged and nurtured, but only if it comports with official narratives. Outliers from this standard must be blocked and punished. Otherwise, there would not be law and order within and without our sacred and righteous Criminal Deep State.
Who determines truth from falsehood? Who decides?
Wrong answer: a bureaucrat, an activist journalist, a social media trust-moderator, a corporate flak, politician
Correct answer: a unanimous jury of 12 Americans in a courtroom after hearing adversarial presentations of evidence
Just ask OJ…
* Was Goldman part of a drug ring? Were the glasses planted? Was Nicole’s condo a drop off? Why was al cowling exempt from testimony and why the exact same bronco as OJ? No one knows the truth. Was OJ a drug pusher big time?
You are mixing to different issues. The govt has no legal right to pressure a company from disseminating a story and Facebook would not be legally liable under s230 as it is not a publisher. The point is that social media is allowed since it can’t be fact checked real time only remove posts which violate tos, such as porn, direct threats etc
The signers of the letter would also have a legal right to post it but they produced it only after someone in the administration started the Russian disinformation excuse
Knowing that was false they could be liable for libel against the ny post or thee repair shop or guilty of giving false statements interfering with a criminal investigation. Remember, the fbi already had the drive which would imply an investigation
* 😂 thanks OJ.
Fecebook is a poorly designed, horribly coded, POS application suite. I speak from many years experience in IT systems development. I guess that makes it a close private entity analogy to the FBI. Both need to disappear. Trump should be able to take care of that regarding the FBI, if he turns out to have a spine that matches his rhetoric. I can only hope that some combination of market disenchantment and competition do the same for FB. I would be ecstatic if, two years from now, FB is just as irrelevant as its predecessor, My Space, is today.
“a Facebook employee who recognized that they would be accused of seeking to influence the election: “When we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it.””
Was that sarcasm, or was that employee just a typical total Fecebook dunce? Since when is participating in a long conspiracy considered mitigating behavior in the commission of a felony?
i get fact checked right and left on FB over Harris
FBi