After President Joe Biden complained about oligarchy and free speech on social media in his farewell address, Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius outrageously behaved as if the president had taken a hands-off approach to social media in office.
Ignatius, who appeared on the Jan. 15 edition of Morning Joe, first claimed that Biden was “troubled” that Big Tech executives who were “seen as supporters of the Democratic Party” had supposedly “embraced Trump and come to support his ideas.” Despite acknowledging the partisan nature of Biden’s concern, Ignatius proceeded to give Biden a free pass for years of pressure on companies to censor speech. “I would note that President Biden had an opportunity during his presidency to rein in these technology industries, to regulate them more, and generally didn't, generally held back from that,” Ignatius told MSNBC co-host Jonathan Lemire.
The Washington Post Columnist continued to hammer the point, “[Biden] was pressed by some Progressives to do more. He didn't.”
Ignatius is wrong. Biden moved mountains to censor speech on a number of major platforms during his time in office, including Twitter and Meta’s platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to the Judiciary Committee in an Aug. 2024 letter that “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
The government also put pressure on Twitter, as revealed by the Twitter Files. The Twitter Files, expose that the Biden Administration pressed for censorship of COVID-19-related content and the silencing of at least one journalist. This journalist, Alex Berenson, was suspended hours after Biden said that COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on social media was “killing people.”
No less than 7 federal agencies were involved in pressuring tech companies to censor speech, including the Department of Homeland Security, The Department of State, The Department of Justice, The Department of Defense, The Department of Health and Human Services, The National Science Foundation and the Department of the Treasury.
Furthermore, the Biden administration’s collusion with and pressure on Big Tech to censor speech was so widespread that it resulted in several states and parties suing the federal government in the Supreme Court case, Murphy v. Missouri..
But aside from that, Mr. Ignatius, I suppose Biden not interfere with the tech companies at all.
Notably, the farewell address that Ignatius referred to included specific complaints about social media companies backing away from pro-censorship leftist fact-checkers. Not long after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would cut ties with fact-checkers and dial back censorship, Biden raged against so-called misinformation and disinformation on social media:
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable.”
Far from giving technology companies a free hand, Biden followed years of pressure with screeching impotently for accountability as he leaves power.
[Related: Clueless Bulwark Podcast Host Belittles Big Tech Censorship After Meta Changes]
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