Zuckerberg shines the light on the control of information

September 3, 2024

Last week, confirmation of a long-held notion of an organized effort to control the information available to the public — which opponents and “fact-checkers” labeled as “false” and “conspiracy theories” — came to light.

A story, attributed to Thomson/Reuters, appeared on Newsmax.com, saying that “Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior officials in the [Biden-Harris] administration had pressured his social media company to censor COVID-19 content during the pandemic, adding that he would push back if this were to happen again.”

This revelation came to light in a letter from Zuckerberg to the House Judiciary Committee. He expressed regret for not speaking up about this earlier, and he also expressed regret about some decisions made by Meta Platforms’ applications Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp about removing certain content that had been identified.

In addition to COVID-19 content, information relating to the Hunter Biden laptop that was available ahead of the 2020 election was labeled “Russian disinformation,” and as a result was widely unavailable to the public. Undoubtedly, this same thing happened to other pieces of information.

Zuckerberg deserves some credit for admitting what was suspected for so long. Too bad it took him years to get to this point. 

In the letter, he also said he would “not make any contributions to support electoral infrastructure in this year's presidential election so as to ‘not play a role one way or another’ in the November vote.”

The White House has responded to this revelation with a statement to Fox News in which it did not admit to or deny Zuckerberg’s charge of the administration applying pressure on Meta.

Zuckerberg wrote, "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it.” “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."

The House Judiciary Committee called Zuckerberg’s admission of Facebook’s censoring of Americans a “big win for free speech.”

This revelation increases the likelihood that some, or perhaps a lot, of the other suspected instances of censoring were also not “conspiracy theories” or “false” information.

It supports the allegations of wide-spread dishonesty in the handling of important information, and that some in our country are willing to play dirty.

The concept of free speech as guaranteed to Americans by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects unpopular speech, and even offensive speech. What is unpopular and/or offensive to one group may well be quite important to another group. 

Without a variety of ideas being freely circulated, how can Americans possibly work their way to a valid understanding of things, so that they can make informed decisions about issues, particularly things as critical as election choices?

And while what Meta and other information sources did may not be against the law, the case that was cited and other similar instances of blocking information certainly is against the spirit of the First Amendment.

What these platforms did certainly interferes with the very reason that our Founders made the amendment protecting free speech the first of the ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. They understood that the people must have all the available information they need and are entitled to, good or bad, popular or unpopular, offensive or not. 

However, such action by elements of our federal, state and local governments definitely is illegal. And Zuckerberg’s message about the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to censor speech ought to anger all of us.

The country is now experiencing a dangerous attack on integrity, honor and honesty. Dishonesty in politics is not new. But it has grown greatly over recent years, and is even more of a problem than ever.

How many newspapers and magazines, TV and radio networks and stations, and internet sites have dishonestly censored ideas that do not match their preferred political ideas? How many in our public education systems are there not to teach the young the things they need to become productive adults, but to indoctrinate them with anti-American ideas?

This lack of honor and integrity is a characteristic of many in the faction that is desperately working to defeat Donald Trump in his effort to be re-elected as President. He is a great threat to their goal of achieving eternal control of the country. This is a goal they cannot achieve through honest means, because this radical socialist/communist goal does not have the necessary support of the electorate. Therefore, their working motto is, “we will win, and we will use any method available to achieve that goal.” 

People with integrity know that they must win honorably and honestly, and if they lose, it must be the result of an honorable and honest effort. That is the American way.

This revelation illustrates what happens when the Constitution and our laws are not followed. Imagine the chaos if the Democrats’ desires to pack the Supreme Court, do away with the Senate filibuster, continue the open-border policy, move control of elections from the states to the federal government, and other radical changes to the country’s operating procedure are put into effect.

Big Tech has grown too big, and is a true threat to our freedoms

America’s Founders recognized that certain rights existed that were absolute and unassailable, and that those rights were fundamental to the nation they had created. Before some states would ratify the new Constitution, they insisted that these rights be specifically detailed. And they were, in the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

Back in the day, we learned important elements of our nation’s founding in school. We studied the Bill of Rights, and learned that the First Amendment cited the five freedoms of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, and petitioning government for the redress of grievances.

Religion and speech have been under attack off and on for a long time. Religion has been under strong attack lately, and now free speech has also become a target.

In many countries, what the people say and do is controlled by a dictatorial government. In America, where the Constitution limits what the government can do, the current attempt to kill free speech is being carried out by a political faction that has among its members the fat-cats who own the Big Tech companies.

The Big Tech companies whose disrepute has blossomed of late — Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon — have grown too big for their britches. The oligarchs who own and run these giants have gained such riches that their over-fed egos persuade them that they can and should control the rest of us for their own narrow purposes.

The level of control of Big Tech reaches into the news we read, see and hear; information we find online; the ads we see and the things we buy; and discussions in the political sphere.

These platforms gather information on users about their likes and dislikes, the websites they visit, videos they watch, issues they are interested in, and their political party affiliation.

This information is used to make money and to influence how users think about many things. Even the results of online Google searches are determined by this user information.

The arrogance of Big Tech has produced the censoring on their platforms of a story in the New York Post on the questionable behavior of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Social media platforms Facebook and Twitter banned the now-former President of the United States Donald Trump from their platforms. And Big Tech took down the upstart social media site Parler, which has now been reborn.

There are continuing issues regarding the censoring of political posts and comments by Republicans and conservatives. Things that do not favor the leftist/liberal side of things are frequently blocked or removed on the grounds that they violate some internal policy.

These policies supposedly protect the public from dangerous speech, which is not the job of social media platforms. They originally were available for users to have their say about any topic, except for things like promoting violence or illegal activities.

The vast majority of speech, even that which is highly offensive to some, has been determined through litigation to be protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, Big Tech owners and employees, who should not be the judges of the appropriateness of their users’ comments, continue to do so. And they condemn language like what has been determined by law to be okay. 

Since these “platforms” frequently abandon that realm in favor of behaving like “publishers,” which are expected to control speech to a higher degree, they should lose the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects platforms from lawsuits over content generated by users on their sites. It gives them the right to moderate content, but does not give them the responsibility to do so.

This allows platforms to operate without needing to moderate content, therefore, platforms must not go too far if they do moderate. Despite this, they continue censoring conservative speech.

Allum Bokhari, an author and technology correspondent, speaking to a conference of the Center for Constructive Alternatives at Hillsdale College, had the following comment in his address: “If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it and place us under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.”

Big Tech platforms are such a sham, I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.
They cheat, and censor what people say, but only those who don’t think their way.
They think they are king of what they do, but they must also be red, and not just blue.
Their egos swelled as they gained power, and now Big Tech needs a really cold shower.
They have gained the throne and now they are woke, but justice will be done if they go broke.

Freedom of speech must be protected. Big Tech should be sanctioned, regulated, or broken up into smaller, less powerful and less harmful units with little ability to control free speech. This would allow the public to express all but the most truly dangerous ideas, as platforms originally were.

Do we still have freedom of speech? Well, yes; sometimes we do.

 

Thank goodness for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects what our Founders viewed as our God-given rights to free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

However, while efforts to infringe upon those and other rights are not unheard of, the attacks on them currently form a far more serious threat than perhaps at any other time, and certainly the most serious in many decades.

There has been ample news coverage of instances where Christian bakers and florists were forced to bake cakes or produce flower arrangements for gay weddings, contrary to their religious beliefs.

A decorated Army chaplain is facing what his attorneys are calling a “career-ending punishment” after he explained to a soldier that he could not conduct a marriage retreat that included same sex couples, but was willing to find someone else to do it.

Somehow, no matter how many people are available and willing to provide these services, those wanting a particular service view it as a horrible crime if a person refuses to perform it on religious grounds.

These days, certain “preferences” held by relatively small groups are thought to be of even greater importance than those rights set in stone by our Founders.

Some small efforts at balancing these breaches have occurred, but one’s ability to practice his or her religion in the customary fashion is only sometimes protected, these days.

These breaches of the First Amendment’s protections are serious enough, but what is happening on social media, on college campuses and elsewhere regarding free speech and free access to information is much worse, if for no other reason because of its broad swath of free speech encroachments that are being slashed through our culture.

Burgess Owens, a conservative African-American entrepreneur and 10-year veteran of the NFL, appeared at Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently. He told the audience, “I grew up in the Deep South during Jim Crow segregation laws. I can tell you how racism looks, how it feels, and what it means. You guys today can go anyplace you want to — any restaurant, any college.”

Well, that was too much for the audience. A female attendee asked him to repeat his first name, and after he did so, she said, “Oh, I thought it was ‘Tom,’” as in Uncle Tom. Cute.

Student activists at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, made good on their threat to disrupt an address by conservative Christina Hoff Sommers. What makes this one worse is that it was at the Law School. Yes, that’s right: students studying the law denied Sommers her free speech right.

The Leftist operators of Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube social media platforms think the way to persuade people to their ideas is to cheat them out of contrary opinions. 

The Media Research Center has produced a report titled “Censored” on how and to what extent popular social media are trying to “persuade” people to their way of thinking, not through the common sense of their ideas or the power of their argument, but by keeping people from seeing other points of view.

Authors Ashley Rae Goldenberg and Dan Gainor tell us that social media influences our worldview and can even influence elections. “Americans are seeing the results everywhere online. Conservative spokespeople, political candidates, even members of Congress, are falling victim to censors and the top tech firms are to blame.”

The article addresses claims of liberal bias and censorship against Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube individually, listing the claims and evaluating them, showing that the claims are supported by evidence.

These include such things as that Twitter censors conservative tweets pro-life ads, and censors content that governments find objectionable.

Liberal attitudes are at the core of Facebook and it censors pro-life advertising. Facebook’s algorithms filter what things its members can see, and it also blocked the “Diamond and Silk” girls’ posts, calling their content “dangerous.” Have you ever seen Diamond and Silk? Dangerous?

Google’s fact-checking system and algorithm contain an anti-conservative bias, and its News Lab partners with the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to identify “hate.”

Charges against YouTube mirror those previously mentioned for the other three media.

Is it that these folks have so little faith in their way of thinking that they don’t trust it to stand up against contrary ideas? Or do they not want to go to the trouble of actual debate and take a chance on losing in the marketplace of free ideas?

Whatever the motivation, using their ability to control what their customers or users see is truly otherworldly.

Liars, cheaters and cowards, oh my!

Faced with unpopular ideas, so many in our country are convinced that the appropriate reaction is to hold their breath, sob uncontrollably, stomp their feet, run to their safe space and demand that the speaker of these ideas shut up.

Private businesses or organizations can control what their Websites show. No argument there. The question, however, is not whether they can, but whether they should? Politics and business is a bad combination, and in these instances is quite dangerous.