President Joe Biden and his administration spent four years continuously attacking the First Amendment and the free speech rights enshrined by the nation’s Founders.
The Biden administration’s censorship efforts ran the gamut from coercing and colluding with Big Tech platforms to silence his opponents; using taxpayer dollars to fund censorship organizations that pledged to cancel conservative voices; enlisting foreign agents to suppress stories from right-leaning media outlets; and weaponizing federal agencies to target those critical of the administration.
This report details 57 distinct Biden initiatives that targeted Americans’ ability to speak their minds. The degree and extent of this coordination is dizzying, spanning no fewer than 90 different government agencies, entangling hundreds of government officials and including thousands of individual censorship actions. The number of people silenced, or prevented from receiving messages they wanted to hear, is all but incalculable. The harm to the nation’s constitutional framework and the system of limited government is similarly beyond measure.
This report identifies and describes each of the 57 initiatives. They are separated into the following four distinct categories to help readers better understand the nature of the Biden administration’s raw abuse of power to subvert the First Amendment rights of Americans:
- Direct Action
The most blunt method of censorship the Biden administration had was to order someone else — a judge, a Big Tech platform or even a foreign government — to censor an American directly. Examples include:
- White House Senior Advisor for the COVID-19 Response Andy Slavitt pressured Amazon to ban books critical of the government’s position on vaccination and the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Department of Justice got an activist judge to ban Big Tech platform X and its owner Elon Musk from notifying users of the government’s surveillance.
- The White House and the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease harassed and threatened Meta employees into censoring content critical of Biden’s COVID-19 policies.
- Policy or Rulemaking
On the opposite end of the spectrum from “direct action” initiatives are those in the “policy or rulemaking” category. Perhaps the most pernicious form of harm to free speech, this type of initiative is the formal codification of censorship into official government policy, often in ways that make it difficult for future administrations to undo. Among the examples are:
- The “Framework” for controlling speech, where the State Department authored and Secretary of State Tony Blinken signed a compact with over 20 foreign nations pledging to pressure Big Tech platforms to censor more.
- “Track F” of the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator, which coordinated (and funded) private research institutions to build artificial intelligence (AI) to target and delete speech the Biden administration viewed as “mis/disinformation.”
- Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’s attempt to create a ministry of truth, named the “Disinformation Governance Board” which would police online speech.
- Partnerships
Under its “whole of society approach,” the Biden administration formed partnerships with state, foreign and private actors in order to silence its critics. Some examples include:
- The State Department’s AI “Partnership,” where the Big Tech firms Anthropic, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI all pledged to work with the government to restrict online speech.
- Throughout the Biden administration, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) had an ongoing partnership with the leftist censorship outfit The Poynter Institute, which manages one of the key entities that directed censorship across Meta platforms.
- Biden’s National Security Council’s extensive collaboration with a U.K. government censorship agency, the Counter Disinformation Unit, to impose U.K. censorship decrees on American agencies and companies.
- Grants
To accomplish its deeply unpopular censorship objectives, the Biden administration often conducted its censorship through lavish grants to censorship organizations (which are subject to less scrutiny and less transparency than federal agencies). Examples include:
- A Department of Homeland Security center that is supposed to stop terrorists at the border was reprogrammed to attack Christians, conservatives and the Republican Party, equating them with militant neo-Nazi groups (see the “Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization”).
- Millions of dollars were collectively funneled to censorship outfits such as NewsGuard, Guidehouse and GDI via grants from the U.S. Air Force, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Endowment for Democracy, respectively.
- The National Science Foundation gave censorship outfit Meedan over $5.7 million to create “minority led partnerships” which would flag internet speech for censorship.
The censorship initiatives listed in this report were conducted by the Biden administration behind closed doors. They should be viewed, though, in the context of Biden’s very public actions. From his first days in office to his farewell address, Biden used his position to push for ever-increasing amounts of censorship. At one press conference, Biden stated that his opponents were spreading “bad information” and “anyone listening to it is getting hurt.” At another, he claimed that Big Tech platforms declining to contract with censorship outfits were “contrary to everything America’s about” and “really shameful.” At a third, he crudely shouted that Facebook (now Meta) was “killing people” by not censoring enough.
It should not be surprising, then, that despite the mountains of evidence of pervasive, illegal censorship throughout the government, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice refused to prosecute any of the perpetrators. In fact, even after a judge concluded that Biden’s government “assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” the Justice Department refused to even launch a single investigation into federal government censorship.
The new president has issued two executive orders (one on free speech and another on artificial intelligence), providing a launching point for correcting this injustice. But more must be done. Doing so begins by learning the extent of the harm the last four years have inflicted — and understanding how easily and swiftly censorship could come roaring back if the American public does not remain more vigilant.
Click on the following link to download and read the full report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
Recommendations
President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship was a fantastic start, but there is much more work to do to dismantle the Biden administration’s censorship initiatives and ensure they are never reconstructed. For example:
- Remove Censors from Government: Government officials behind Biden’s censorship initiatives, such as current National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan among others listed in Initiative #57, should be removed from their posts and replaced with pro-American free speech advocates.
- Defund Censorship Groups: Censorship outfits like those named in this report, such as Ad Fontes, Meedan and The Poynter Institute, should be prohibited from receiving future government grants.
- Provide Justice for Victims of Censorship: Congress should enact legislation, such as Rep. Harriet Hageman’s “Standing to Challenge Government Censorship Act,” that creates new private rights of action for victims of government censorship to seek justice.
- Follow the Constitution: Congress should reassert its constitutional authority and rescind its vast, unconstitutional delegation of power to independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and Securities & Exchange Commission.
Click on the following link to download and read the full report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
