Political motivations drove Facebook’s reported spying on users’ private messages in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Brownstone Institute founder and President Jeffrey Tucker told MRC Free Speech America Thursday.
“The collaboration between government and Big Tech is one of the great disasters for human liberty in our time, and it’s been exposed now,” Tucker said. “But far from having stopped it, it’s going on every single day right before our eyes.”
Political actions that preceded the reported spying included Facebook’s moderation of COVID-19-related content throughout 2020, Tucker said.
“The pandemic response throughout 2020 was overwhelmingly a political action designed to empower administrative bureaucracies against the Trump administration,” he said in exclusive quotes provided to MRC Free Speech America. “Facebook chose sides. We know this.”
Tucker’s words came after the New York Post reported on Wednesday that Facebook spied on the private messages and data of American users. Facebook reported users to the FBI if they questioned the results of the 2020 election or expressed “anti-government or anti-authority sentiments,” The Post reported.
Under the FBI-Facebook collaboration operation, a Facebook employee flagged certain private messages over the past 19 months and sent them in redacted form to the domestic terrorism operational unit at FBI headquarters without a subpoena, New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported.
There have been several other instances wherein the Biden administration and Big Tech have apparently worked together to censor certain information online. The White House touted Big Tech censorship during Thursday’s “United We Stand Summit,” fawning in a press release that tech companies including YouTube, Twitch, Microsoft and Facebook were announcing new actions to prevent “hate-fueled violence.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that his entire agency is targeting the “emerging threat” of “anti-government sentiment” during MSNBC’s The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart on Sept. 11.
In a long tweet thread on Sept. 1, Schmitt uncovered some bombshell revelations in documents provided during the course of a First Amendment lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. The documents contain evidence that government agencies directed social media companies to undertake several content moderation actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month that a general request from the FBI prompted his platform to censor the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
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