America's Talking - Biden-Harris Admin Under Fire for Pressuring Facebook to Censor Americans

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a firestorm of controversy this week when he sent a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee admitting his mistake in caving to pressure from the Biden administration to censor Americans’ posts that contradicted the administration’s viewpoints on COVID-19. "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 letter said. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook made posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop harder to see during the 2020 election at the request of the FBI, the latest evidence of coordinated social media censorship driven by the federal government. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulip, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire service. Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's incited a huge admission this week when he said the Biden-Harris-White White House pressured his social media company to censor Americans, including right-leaning media over issues such as COVID-19 responses and the Hunter Biden laptop. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, you wrote our story about Zuckerberg's admissions. What are your top takeaways? Yeah, I mean, not only did I write this story, I've been covering this issue for a couple of years now, and it's slowly unfolded. And maybe the average American was too busy to keep up with what Mark Zuckerberg is up to. But this is the admission that's been a long time coming.

We've known for a while, Dan, that the FBI pressured big tech companies during the 2020 election to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story. The FBI told companies like Twitter, like Facebook, that this story, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. It was a fabricated fake story, and they should silence it if it comes up during the election. So I believe it was October of 2020, the New York Post broke the story about Hunter Biden's laptop. and Twitter locked their account. The media called it basically a conspiracy, you know, just a few weeks out from the election. Of course, that laptop was tied to a greater allegation of that Hunter Biden, possibly at the behest of President Joe Biden, was globetrotting, taking donations essentially for in the name of influencing the Biden family. And so that the big tech shut down that story because the FBI pressured them to.

And later it came out, of course, that the FBI or that the Hunter Biden laptop was verified and totally true, not Russian disinformation. And now we have, in this kind of stunning admission, Mark Zuckerberg, who, you know, leads Facebook, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee where he admitted it was a mistake to listen to the FBI, that he wouldn't do it again. And some of these quotes are pretty interesting, Dan. And he talks about how the Biden administration 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, end quote. So pretty interesting. Of course, it's not just 100 by laptop.

COVID-19 was front and center with social media censorship, even questioning the vaccine, questioning masks could get your account, you know, restricted or shut down. And now in the aftermath, we know that there was some harm with vaccines. We know that masks weren't nearly as effective as we were told. For instance, cloth masks do pretty much nothing. And so there's just different. There was essentially then there was a nuance to a lot of this dogma about COVID-19, but you weren't allowed to have any nuance in your post.

And so we're seeing Zuckerberg admit what people suspected all along. Not only has big tech been censoring people on huge issues like COVID-19, like, you know, the last election. but it was doing so because the federal government, the law enforcement arm of the federal government was pressuring them to do so. So since all of that censorship, Casey, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, renamed it X, of course, has said under his ownership, he will not agree to government pressured censorship. Mark Zuckerberg, Justice Wee, comes out, and Rick says he says,

he regrets caving to some of this government pressure, said they'll be smarter going forward, will not cave. How does this change the social media environment when it comes to things like this? Do you think it will have any effect on the election? Well, hopefully, I think it makes social media companies a little more distrustful of the federal government and willing to have a backbone to stand up to them. We've seen companies and, you know, really wrestle with this issue. like should Apple turn over the phone password or way to unlock the phone of someone who is accused of a crime?

Should, you know, different, should AT&T hand over phone records of different people? You know, this is the ongoing question. I think and I hope that these companies get more of a backbone. They're not intimidated. Of course, it will affect the election. These companies have a ton of influence over what posts people see. I mean, people spend a lot more time now on social. media than they do on more traditional media outlets. And so social media has a huge impact on what

information people consume, what ads they see for any election, what news articles they see and how favorable those news articles are on either candidate. So they have a ton of control. Google, for instance, you can, has been under a lot of scrutiny day. And we've talked about this as well. When you Googled certain candidates or certain issues, like for instance, Googling Trump, you might get a favorable story of Connollah Harris pop up. And you might say, well, that would be. wouldn't really influence me. But in the aggregate, over, you know, a hundred-day election cycle that will influence people. And some of these swing states, you're only, you know, a few thousand votes can make all the difference. And so when a company like Google, like these social media

companies, have this much power, it's not enough to just totally sink a campaign, but it is enough to play in the margins and swing some of these really important states. Yeah. When it comes to Google, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Trump. If people were Googling it, they were getting some odd content on something as big as an attempted, attempted assassination of a former president and the GOP candidate for president. Yeah, I mean, so that's, I mean, if there can be such heavy-handed influence on an issue that important that we're paying attention to, just imagine how much can happen on less well-known issues.

You know, an energy worker in Pennsylvania is Googling what Kamala Harris really believes about fracking because he's heard mixed reviews. And so what do energy workers in Pennsylvania see, Dan? When they're geolocated IP addresses, search Kamala Harris fracking. Do they see the same thing as you and I see either in D.C. or Chicago? We don't know. It's, you know, possibly definitely not. I mean, you know, they can certainly tailor search results by different things.

So those are the kind of things that can really influence election. And it's almost impossible to keep oversight over it. And of course, the current administration has no incentive to regulate that because these tech companies are very liberal. We know that that's not just an assumption. We know, for instance, the political donations of employees at big tech companies are almost entirely Democrat. We have seen some leading tech, you know, big tech leaders have come out.

more conservative, like Peter Thiel, like Elon Musk, but the run-of-the-meal Google employee who is setting these kinds of things is very likely Democrat or liberal. And so current administration, many of the bureaucrats who oversee these things who also tend to be liberal, that there's sort of an alignment of interests that support one party over the other. And I'm not sure what much can be done about. Definitely an interesting conversation. Casey, thank you for joining us today. listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.