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According to an article published in The Intercept, the Federal Governmemnt is using its powers of surveillance and infiltration to control online speech and monitor users of popular social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and others. Federal agencies in the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have broadened their original mission from fighting terrorism to battling online “misinformation.”
The Intercept article states that, “There is ... a formalized process for government officials to flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.”
In other words, the Federal Government is directly involved in the censorship of online speech.
"Misinformation," Defined
Authors Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang note that the DHS is currently targeting speech that it considers to be “dangerous.” But what sort of danger are we talking about?
Online users are liable to have their posts “shadow banned,” or outright censored if they question (for example) the regime's narrative regarding the origins of COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, or the reliability of our voting system. This kind of social media censorship has long been a complaint of political dissidents, but the government's involvement is a relatively recent development.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, told Joe Rogan in August of 2022 that FBI agents visited his team in October 2020 to ask (see: tell) them to suppress any sharing on Facebook of articles or items related to Hunter Biden’s laptop. Zuckerberg said that the agents informed him that the laptop stories “fit the pattern” of Russian disinformation. Later, after Joe Biden won the election, his son’s damning laptop, which contained evidence of multiple crimes allegedly involving Joe Biden, was verified as authentic.
We can conclude, therefore, that the Federal Government's designation of "misinformation" means simply, “information that we don't like, regardless of its accuracy.”
The DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Reviews lays out in black and white that the feds are interested in targeting this “inaccurate information” from the general public regarding “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
If The Intercept article is correct, the current administration seems less concerned about your First Amendment rights and more concerned about propping up its own power. As one unnamed FBI special agent told Klippenstein and Fang in 2020: “Man, I don’t even know what’s legal anymore.”
First Amendment To the Back of the Line
The United States Constitution guarantees every American the right to free speech. In theory, the United States government must respect that right and, therefore, should not be in the game of online censorship, no matter how repugnant that speech is. In reality, the DHS leans on tech giants to “fight disinformation” by using them as private cut-outs to throttle or suppress information and opinions the administration doesn't like.
According to a bevy of supreme court precedents, a private actor is effectively "duputized" when it acts on behalf of the government. These types of public-private partnerships are obliged it to honor the same constitutional restrictions as the state itself, meaning this entire enterprise is probably highly unconstitutional.
1984 or nah?
As of this writing, Erich Schmitt, the Republican Attorney General of Missouri, is suing the DHS and CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) to uncover the extent to which the federal government manipulates, suppresses, or otherwise harms free speech on social media. If the released meeting minutes turned up by Schmitt’s office are any indication, the feds are currently trampling on First Amendment rights in the name of combating "misinformation" and "disinformation," as they define it. They are pursuing this objective by leveraging the power and reach of social media giants and other tech companies.
This story should concern all Americans, especially those interested in the truth. Truth cannot be pursued without a radical respect for the rights of individuals to think and speak and advocate for their differing and controversial views. As Jordan Peterson has famously said, "There is no difference between free speech and free thought. ... The reason you have the right to free speech isn't so you can just say whatever you want. ... You have a right to free speech because the entirety of society depends on the free thought of the individuals who compose it for its ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future."
Our federal government is not--indeed, cannot be--the lone arbiter of the truth. And billion-dollar international corporations should not be the government's 1984-esque shock troops.
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Disclaimer: This content is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
