Democrats had a tough time at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing yesterday on the censorship industrial complex.
They had to argue there was never any censorship during the Biden administration (including during Covid!) and that free speech and freedom of the press were never threatened by the partnership of government agencies with private institutions to combat “disinformation.” After all, the government was just trying to catch foreign disinformation operations, they argued, so any censorship that did happen was necessary and proper.
Put another way, the censorship industrial complex never happened — and if it did it was a good thing and the targets deserved it.
At one point early on in the hearing, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., more or less came right out and said as much. While his staff displayed a large placard showing a screenshot of a piece I wrote in February 2023 about the Twitter Files — with “NOT TRUE” stamped across the screenshot in read letters — Welch claimed that there was nothing whatsoever to the Twitter Files story. Government funding that went to private entities for “disinformation” monitoring, he said, was actually “to help counter foreign disinformation.” All the government did, in Welch’s telling, was alert Twitter when users violated the company’s own terms of service and community guidelines. Nothing to see here!
If anything is “NOT TRUE,” it’s this absurd characterization of what the Twitter Files actually revealed. Released in tranches to a group of journalists shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the Twitter Files exposed a coordinated and sustained effort by the intelligence community to co-opt and deputize social media platforms like Twitter into censoring American citizens. Basically, it was a scheme to allow the government to censor Americans in a way that would have been straightforwardly unconstitutional if the feds had tried to do it directly. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
