No, Things Aren't Worse Now on Speech. It's Not Even Close

As Google becomes the latest company to admit to mass censorship, the mania over Jimmy Kimmel has morphed into a grotesque propaganda campaign

Google this week sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee:

Senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, conducted, repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.

While the company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user generated content as online platforms, including Alphabet grappled. With these decisions, the administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.

It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content, and the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.

Along with the Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s admission about Biden officials who would “scream” or “curse” about removing content, the Google letter caps the trifecta of major Internet platforms who’ve admitted to partnering with the government in systematic censorship in the pre-Trump period.

YouTube removed thousands of people from its platform at the government’s behest during the pandemic. Tens of thousands more were deamplified or labeled, often incorrectly. Even before letters like the one above, this was no secret. When reporters like me called to ask YouTube, Meta, or Twitter why this or that person had been sanctioned during the pandemic, they told us flat-out they were following parameters laid out by government. Google announced this publicly, in statements like:

Prevention misinformation: We do not allow content that promotes information that contradicts health authority guidance on the prevention or transmission of specific health conditions, or on the safety, efficacy or ingredients of currently approved and administered vaccines.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t just suppress information that contradicted “health authority guidance,” information which incidentally was often true (as in the cases of people like Jay Bhattacharya, Alex Berenson, and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff). They made conscious decisions to leave up government misinformation. While YouTube was removing critics of the vaccine, it was leaving up a CNN Town Hall featuring President Biden saying that if you get the shot, “you’re not going to die”:

Before this year there were entire federal bureaucracies devoted to policing speech, from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force to the White House Office of Digital Strategy. State agencies also partnered with “private” NGOs (often, funded by government) to create secondary bureaucracies charged with policing speech, like the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory, which denied making content recommendations until forced to turn over documents showing they did just that. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security were having monthly (in some cases weekly) meetings with upwards of two dozen Internet companies, funneling “guidance” on content on a range of topics, from Covid to Russia to Iran to “U.S. Elections.” Like a parolee, Facebook had to send a “bi-weekly Covid content report” to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Whether you blame this on the administration of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or the first term of Donald Trump (during which some of these bodies flourished), it’s now undeniable that federal pressure or “jawboning” to suppress dissent was systematic long before Jimmy Kimmel got a few days off.

How did politicians and the U.S. media respond to confirmation that the last administration engaged in wholesale censorship not of one jerkwad talk show host, but the entire world? They pretended it didn’t happen: