A George Mason law professor called out the Biden administration and Big Tech for their collusion and censorship efforts.
Antonin Scalia Law School Professor Todd Zywicki torched the “horrible behavior” of anti-free speech social media companies and made a strong case for more competition in the industry to fight censorship. Zywicki made these points during a July 23 virtual Federalist Society event on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) investigation of Meta. He was joined by former Biden DOJ Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Slade Bond and Asheesh Agarwal, a consultant at the American Edge Project, a coalition that includes Meta and Big Tech lobbying outfit NetChoice.
Zywicki called rampant social media censorship and Big Tech’s collusion with the federal government to censor the “elephant in the room” of the antitrust debate. He further criticized tech companies both for caving to government pressure and for voluntarily silencing Americans out of “corporate wokeness.”
The law professor also added that, particularly in the cases of the suppressed Hunter Biden laptop scandal and pandemic discussions, Big Tech censored more than simply the information they considered false.
“[W]hat's striking about a lot of this, of course, is that they are censoring true speech,” he said. Zywicki added, “I know this personally, because I brought a lawsuit when George Mason imposed its vaccine mandate. And YouTube censored two of my videos, which were true. Everything I said was true. They never explained why they had pulled down my videos. They're still down, last I checked.”
The law professor later specifically pointed to Twitter’s censorship of doctors and Facebook's “abhorrent” silencing of support groups for those suffering from vaccine side effects. “[Facebook] was where people who were injured by the vaccines went to share their stories and look for cures and basically support groups,” he said. “Facebook simply vaporized these support groups because they thought they would spread vaccine hesitancy, not even misinformation.”
Zywicki also called out Amazon for, at the behest of the Biden administration, "suppressing books that violated the government's sort of woke corporate America’s views on COVID.” MRC detailed this pressure in its bombshell report unpacking 57 censorship initiatives pushed by the Biden administration.
Zywicki went on to argue that a lack of competition amongst platforms allowed for this anti-free speech approach during the COVID-19 pandemic, labelling social media censorship as an antitrust issue. Zywicki noted that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch had shown concern over this possibility during the oral arguments for the Murthy v. Missouri case.
As an example of the vulnerability of there being only a few big tech companies, Zywicki brought up The Facebook Files. “What you saw was the White House, the Biden White House saying, ‘Why can’t you guys be more like YouTube? YouTube’s being very aggressive about censoring guys like Zywicki, why do you allow people to speak on your platform?’ They were basically using YouTube as a cudgel against Facebook,” to get it to do what they wanted, he said.
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