President Joe Biden was right to warn that democracy is under attack. He just never mentioned that he and his allies were the ones undermining it.
On Aug. 26, Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Meta, put out a bombshell letter.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.
As his letter alluded to, his social media sites, Facebook and Instagram, did censor people who spoke against the government’s preferred coronavirus narrative.
Zuckerberg wasn’t through.
“In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” he wrote.
He’s referring to the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the New York Post broke shortly before the 2020 election. It linked Joe Biden to his son’s business dealings, strongly suggesting the elder Biden was corrupt. It was an October Surprise that could have swung the election — if the public heard enough about it. But social media sites, including Facebook, locked the story down, contending it was Russian disinformation.
It wasn’t. Earlier this year, the FBI confirmed the laptop was Hunter’s during his federal firearms trial.
Think about the implications here. The FBI received a copy of the laptop in 2019. An IRS whistleblower told Congress the FBI soon knew it was legitimate. Instead of moving quickly to prosecute Hunter Biden — and Joe Biden — it worked to make social media companies believe the laptop was Russian disinformation. It wanted to prime the companies to squash the story if it ever came out.
That was election interference. That was a disinformation operation run against the American public by the American government. That may have swung the election.
The government manipulating the public in this way is a genuine threat to free speech and democracy.
Don’t take my word for it. In April, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released its “2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.”
“Conversations in groups or peer-to-peer on social media platforms and via messaging applications were subject to censorship, monitoring, and action from authorities,” the report on China states. “These developments further eroded freedom of speech.”
Yes, they do — which is why it’s so concerning that the American government used similar tactics against Americans. And no, the federal government can’t bypass the First Amendment by demanding private companies do the things it’s prohibited from doing directly.
It should be obvious how this threatens democracy. If a government cabal determines who can say what to whom, the voting public’s autonomy is hopelessly compromised.
Yet, it’s hard to find a prominent Democrat who’s objected to this abuse of power. Worse, the party that’s spent years claiming Donald Trump is a threat to democracy has little to say about its leader using power in such an authoritarian manner. That’s not surprising given that Democrats have fought for months to keep lefty presidential candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West off ballots around the country.
Democrats don’t want to protect democracy. They want to protect your right to vote for the person party elites install as a candidate even if she didn’t receive a single primary vote.
Russian President Vladimir Putin would be proud.
The national mainstream media isn’t interested either. Vox acknowledged that what Zuckerberg outlined “sounds bad.” But it immediately turned dismissive. “None of this information is new,” it wrote.
American democracy isn’t dying in darkness. It’s dying right out in the open while the political and media elite cheer its demise.
Victor Joecks is a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
