As many Democrats and much of the Leftmedia bemoaned supposed government censorship following Disney’s short suspension of Jimmy Kimmel for his gross lie asserting that the assassin of Charlie Kirk was one of MAGA’s own, the actual evidence of government speech suppression from the Biden administration was admitted by Google.
In a letter sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Alphabet, Inc., the parent company of Google and YouTube, acknowledged that its platforms had engaged in censorship and speech suppression against conservatives at the behest of the Biden administration.
The letter states:
Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.
While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content.
The Biden administration, including Joe Biden himself, “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” Alphabet noted. “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content, and the Company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
That’s quite the acknowledgment given that Democrat lawmakers have repeatedly framed such pressure campaigns as entirely above board. They insist that Google and other social media companies were acting in their own free interest to monitor speech on their platforms.
Yet when the Trump administration has made the exact same argument — and after no officials took action — the Democrats scream about free speech infringement.
Granted, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” That wasn’t clear, and his comment was easily spun to appear more sinister than it was. Nevertheless, the fact remains that words without actions do not constitute a violation.
As Carr has since explained, “What I spoke about last week is that when concerns are raised about news distortion … there’s an easy way for parties to address that and work that out. In the main, that takes place between local television stations that are licensed by the FCC and what we call national programmers like Disney. They work that out, and there doesn’t need to be any involvement of the FCC.” He added, “Now, if they don’t, there’s a way that is not as easy, which is someone can file a complaint at the FCC, and then the FCC, by law, as set up by Congress, has to adjudicate that complaint. And what I’ve been very clear in the context of the Kimmel episode is [that] the FCC, and myself in particular, have expressed no view on the ultimate merits.”
However, Google’s admission that it did indeed suppress and censor speech under pressure from the Biden administration is a genuine example of the government violating Americans’ First Amendment rights.
The same thing happened with Facebook, which also admitted it colluded with the Biden White House to suppress conservative speech. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a big deal of changing course back in January.
Similarly, Google has also promised to remedy the situation by reinstating the YouTube accounts of thousands of individuals it had removed. Furthermore, the company promised that it “has not and will not empower fact checkers to take action on or label content across the Company’s services.”
It is a positive development that Google has acknowledged this, although it’s hard to believe that candor would have happened had Donald Trump not won the election.
Political commentator Matt Walsh, who lost a lot of money when YouTube demonetized his podcast, writes, “This is the most widespread and devastating campaign against free speech in modern times. It was criminal. It was unconstitutional. And as it was going on, we didn’t hear a word from any of the pundits on cable news who are now bloviating about the plight of Jimmy Kimmel. All of the people who are calling Jimmy Kimmel a free speech martyr were completely silent as Google was systematically censoring conservatives. In fact, they were cheering Google’s censorship.”
“Sorry” is great and all, but it doesn’t equal restitution or justice.
