Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop more online censorship laws
SAN FRANCISCO (LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration has resumed “asking” social media companies to censor content it deems as “disinformation” ahead of the November elections, the Democrat chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed last week.
NextGov reports that U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) spoke to reporters during a briefing at the RSA Conference cybersecurity event that the administration resumed talks it had temporarily paused upon seeing that a number of U.S. Supreme Court justices indicated they were favorable to the administration’s position in Murthy v. Missouri, which concerns whether the government’s appeals to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to delete objectionable content change private content decisions into violations of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.
“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” Warner said. While conservatives and Republicans stress that the administration shows an unprecedented hostility toward private speech, the senator holds that administration attorneys have actually been “too timid” in the case.
“With less than six months to go until election day, millions of Americans are wondering what tricks the Biden administration has up its sleeve to tilt the election in its favor,” responded Family Research Council Action Director Matt Carpenter. “Senator Warner let the cat out of the bag by admitting the federal government will collaborate with social media corporations to shadow ban, or otherwise censor, conservative speech. Last election, these corporations buried information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, specifically related to his business dealings, which implicated his father. We know a significant number of Americans would have voted differently if they knew the truth about the Biden family’s crooked deals with foreign actors.”
For years, conservatives and other dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy have criticized the world’s largest online information and communications platforms, including Google, Facebook, and (until ownership changed hands in late 2022) Twitter, for using their vast influence to slant the news, sources, ideas, and arguments their users see and share through their services. One of their chief rationales for doing so was to prevent “misinformation” from influencing elections, which critics denounce as merely a pretext to sway elections in their favor.
The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.
Starting under the Trump administration and continuing into the Biden White House, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) have factored heavily into these activities, working with Stanford University and other entities to establish the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), through which requests to censor “thousands” of conservative posts could be laundered so as to keep the government’s fingerprints off censorship decisions.
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop more online censorship laws