And the Progressive-Democrats don’t care. They have the power, so they don’t need any stinking authority, and they’re going ahead: with censorship of what average Americans are allowed to say, even allowed to know.
The White House announced their efforts with Facebook to take aggressive action on problematic social media posts. The administration said they would work to flag and censor anything they deemed to be disinformation about COVID-19.
Biden’s Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy:
We expect more from our technology companies. We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability. We are asking them to monitor misinformation more closely.
Biden himself, through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki:
“There are also proposed changes we have made to social media platforms, including Facebook….
We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation[.]
And overt spying on private citizens’ personal communications to facilitate the censorship, per the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Democratic National Committee:
…plans to work with SMS carriers to monitor text messages and dispel misinformation about vaccines.
“If you send a text message to a friend or to a family member or to whoever and it includes whatever they deem as misinformation that somehow you’re going to get a message on your phone from the government,” David Rubin of the Rubin Report.
And the threat, from none other than President Joe Biden (D):
Mr Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that—and they’re killing people.”
Never mind that the censorship is a blatant violation of our 1st Amendment and of long-standing and myriad case law:
As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned “‘a private entity can qualify as a state actor,’ subject to First Amendment protections….” Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019) …;
“When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,” Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974);
“When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,” Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982);
“When the government acts jointly with the private entity.” Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982).
The government doesn’t get to avoid censorship by farming out its censoring to third parties.
And there’s this: it’s well established in Civil Rights law and Supreme Court rulings that private enterprises that are public accommodations (of which diners are a canonical example) may not discriminate, under the 14th Amendment, on the basis of race. It’s an easy extension of that “may not discriminate” to include 1st Amendment speech, and it’s quite clear that Facebook et al., have become, if they weren’t created as, public accommodations.
Us average Americans need to keep this blatant disregard for our Constitution firmly in mind in November 2022.
H/t Grim’s Hall