By Mike Huckabee
February 17, 2023
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Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is making good on his promise to look into Big Tech’s censorship practices, particularly regarding COVID. The committee has sent subpoenas to the CEOs of five social media mega-corporations “for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech,” they announced in a statement on Wednesday.
Subpoenas were served on:
Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, parent company of Google
Andy Jassy of Amazon
Tim Cook of Apple
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook)
Satya Nadella of Microsoft
These subpoenas really are a last resort, as the committee has been trying since December to engage with the five companies. Apparently, there was no cooperation from any of the CEOs. Would anyone have expected differently?
According to Debra Heine at AMERICAN GREATNESS, House Republicans are “looking into allegations that [the] Biden regime colluded with big technology and social-media companies to censor legitimate views on issues such as COVID-19 policy that countered the Biden White House’s propaganda.”
The purpose of this effort, Jordan said, is “protecting and advancing fundamental free speech principles” and “examining how private actors coordinate with the government to suppress First Amendment-protected speech.”
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER has more.
Did you notice that one Big Tech corporation’s CEO is NOT on the list? It’s Twitter, of course, because CEO Elon Musk has been doing plenty on his own to protect speech by exposing the collusion between government agencies such as the FBI and private companies to suppress it. The “Twitter Files” have told us far more about how content moderation works than we’ll probably ever hear from the other CEOs, who have until March 23 to comply.
We’re also learning a great deal about this from the court filings from a lawsuit brought against the Biden administration by the state attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. In fact, there’s breaking news on that front. As the WASHINGTON EXAMINER reports, a request filed Wednesday in that case “revealed that officials at the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regularly communicated with social media platforms about their content moderation decisions.”
Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement, “We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done. The Department of Justice is cowering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies.”
The ‘Justice’ Department has identified at least 45 federal officials at various agencies who were “regularly communicating” with social media platforms about so-called “misinformation.” There are apparently others, officials at other agencies, whom they so far have “declined” to identify. More details here...
When Mark Zuckerberg gets before the Judiciary Committee, he’ll likely be asked about some of the findings from this lawsuit. Example: We know at least 32 federal officials --- including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (editorial aside: !!), and the White House (editorial aside: !!!) --- have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms. Let’s dig into those conversations.
Still, if these CEOs are called to testify, I wouldn’t expect to get a whole lot out of them. Recall that when former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in the hot seat at a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2018, his answer to the question of whether his company “shadow-banned” was simply NO. Same for “censored.” Clearly they did, and he surely was aware of this, but the definitions of “shadow-ban” and even “censor” are apparently malleable enough for him to weasel out of a perjury charge, at least with THIS ‘Justice’ Department, which will offer him whatever escape hatch he needs.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/10/jack-dorsey-told-congress-under-oath-twitter-was-not-shadow-banning/
The work of congressional committees is supposed to serve a legislative purpose, and this one’s certainly does. As the committee states in the subpoenas, “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of statutory limits on the Executive Branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee on the Judiciary must first understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Speaking of Twitter and Elon Musk, there’s one more reason to be appreciative of him: the message he had for the 10,000 attendees of the 2023 World Government Summit that was just held in Dubai. Did you know there WAS a “World Government Summit”? Don’t like the sound of that, especially after seeing that the keynote address was given by none other than the scary power-mad Bond villain Klaus Schwab.
https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/home
The participants at the World Government Summit are described as “government officials, thought leaders, global experts, and decision makers,” and that sounds like just the audience that needs to hear someone like Musk speak out AGAINST world government. Perhaps it made him the fly in the punch bowl with this crowd, but that’s just what he did.
He explained why a one-world government would lead to collapse of civilization as a whole.
“All throughout history, civilizations have risen and fallen,” he said, “but it hasn’t meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there have been all these separate civilizations that have been separated by great distances... “So I think we have to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a single civilization, because if we are...then, the whole thing may collapse...We want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, the whole thing doesn’t collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.”
Watch him here.
The full interview with Musk runs a little over 30 minutes and I hope you’ll make the time. They discuss why he bought Twitter, with Elon saying he was “a little worried” about “the direction and the effect of social media on the world.” He thought it needed to be a sort of “digital public square” that could operate with “the least amount of censorship.” He didn’t think it was right to “put a thumb on the scale beyond the laws of the countries.” He didn’t think it was right to impose the values of, “essentially, San Francisco and Berkeley.”
In a moment of understatement, he said that Twitter had been doing “a little too much” to impose those values on the rest of the world. He wanted to “correct that thumb on the scale, if you will.” They address other issues as well, even the question of space aliens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrz5IOIGkBg
RELATED: Matt Taibbi, who has been working with Musk to process and release the “Twitter Files,” participated in a debate in Toronto with partner Douglas Murray, and they SLAYED their opponents with their argument that the mainstream media (American and Canadian) should not be trusted. In fact, they won by the largest margin ever at these debates. Much of their argument involved the Canadian trucker protest and the failure of the media to counter the prevailing false narrative that it was organized by bigots.
As persuasive as these two are, they might want to take their show on the road. Congratulations to them!
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/
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