A former official from the Biden administration is calling for the silencing of online free speech at a time when the country is mourning the senseless murder of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, who was killed while exercising his First Amendment right to free speech.
Speaking on Wednesday on CBS Mornings, Laura Edelson, a former chief technologist at the Biden-led Department of Justice, used the reaction to Kirk’s murder to demand more censorship from social media companies. Edelson blamed pro-free speech moves at Meta and X for the quick spread of “bad information” online, claiming they were “absolutely” responsible.
“This was a conscious choice that several platforms made—most notably, obviously, X, but also Meta's platforms—to make a shift from, you know, having things like fact checking, from having measures in place that would allow, you know, hate speech, violence to be deaccelerated by the algorithm and to have trust and safety teams that would build systems that would, again, deamplify polarizing content,” Edelson said, adding: “This was a business decision that they made. And this is the result.”
To his credit, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil challenged Edelson’s censorship push, noting that some refer to speech as violence. He also questioned whether platforms should be trusted to determine what is hate speech or misinformation. In response, Edelson again blamed platforms for not shadow-banning content she doesn’t like.
The anti-free speech Biden administration hired Edelson in early October 2024 to help the DOJ Civil Rights Division “ensure equity in AI.” A DOJ press release stated at the time that Edelson was “helping to systematically expand the division’s AI enforcement capacity and to increase the efficiency of its operations by harnessing technological modernization.”
Related: Biden’s Plan to Use Government Power, Funds to Cement Leftist Dominance of AI
The DOJ was involved in at least 15 of the Biden administration’s 57 heinous censorship initiatives compiled by the Media Research Center in a bombshell report. This included regular meetings with social media platforms to pressure them into censorship (Censorship Initiative #31). Separately, the DOJ coordinated censorship efforts with these platforms (Censorship Initiative #32). The Office of the Solicitor General also repeatedly argued in favor of Big Tech censorship and even in favor of forcing a business owner to engage in speech that went against her religious beliefs (Censorship Initiative #40). The same office defended censoring the religious expression of schools receiving vouchers in Maine (Censorship Initiative #39). Naturally, as the call was often coming from inside the house, Biden’s DOJ refused to investigate or prosecute illegal government censorship (Censorship Initiative #55).
These are just a few of the censorship initiatives that took place at Biden’s DOJ, which also included investigating the speech of concerned parents and faithful Catholics and putting a gag order on a former president while he was running for the office.
The division in which Edelson worked pushed AI companies towards anti-competitive, anti-free speech “exclusivity contracts,” or agreements with major publications to pay to train an AI model on their publicly available content (Censorship Initiative #9).
These contracts not only give the publications a privileged position to influence the responses chatbot users receive, but also censor ideologically disfavored publications.
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.
