A writer at billionaire Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post had an unusual response to President Donald Trump’s executive order on censorship: Won’t anyone think of the censors?
The Post once again perfectly turned a situation on its head by arguing that censorship is free speech and efforts to curtail the silencing of speech are true censorship. In a Jan. 22 article by Technology news analysis writer Will Oremus, The Post outrageously condemned President Donald Trump and Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) efforts to fight censorship on social media and downplayed government efforts to make social media companies censor. The Post partially accomplished this by repeatedly citing a litigation director at the misleadingly named Knight First Amendment Institute, Alex Abdo, who aggressively defended Big Tech censorship.
Abdo reportedly told The Post that free speech advocates made “an attempt to rewrite history” and are rushing to judge the federal government’s massive pressure on companies such as Meta and pre-Musk Twitter. Abdo even suggested that Trump’s executive order should investigate those who have hindered the work of so-called misinformation researchers who have colluded with the government to censor.
“‘If this were sincere, then Trump’s administration would also investigate Jim Jordan’s committee for heavy-handedly trying to stifle research’ on misinformation, Abdo said of Trump’s latest order,” according to The Post. Abdo appears to have been referring to Jordan’s investigation of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was exposed by the Twitter Files for colluding with the federal government to censor Americans for posting so-called misinformation.
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider took The Post to task for portraying censorship as free speech, “The Washington Post still hasn’t read the memo. Everyone in Silicon Valley is now admitting that what Biden did was illegal and their collusion with him was wrong. The Post is still living in a fantasy land where they think what’s up is down and what’s wrong is right.”
Abdo’s views are par for the course at the Knight Institute. Abdo’s employer has sided with Big Tech platforms censoring users, pro-censorship researchers, and bureaucrats colluding to censor speech online.
In two recent supreme court cases the states of Texas and Florida fought Big Tech lobbying group NetChoice for the right to curtail censorship on social media platforms. In the NetChoice litigation, the Knight Institute fought for social media platforms’ right to censor as they please. The Knight Institute has also repeatedly targeted X after Musk purchased the platform. The organization sued X over its term of service and opposed Musk’s suits against pro-censorship organizations such as the “digital brownshirts” at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The Knight Institute’s Executive Director Jameel Jaffer even celebrated social media platforms' decision to ban Trump in 2021.
Beyond highlighting Abdo, The Post maliciously rephrased Trump’s recent executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" as a “White House commitment not to unduly pressure tech companies on their speech policies.”
The alternate wording appears to have been an intentional choice used to allow The Post to argue that Trump was a hypocrite if he called out social media censorship or biased leftist fact-checkers who aid and abet both government and Big Tech censors. “To deliver on that promise, the Trump administration will need to ensure it does not unduly pressure social media companies either — e.g., to allow posts the companies would rather take down, or to drop their fact-checking programs.” The Post wrote.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
