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:

The New York Times ran hundreds of stories about Covid-19 during the pandemic, including many that repeated inaccurate claims and remain uncorrected, along with countless editorials decrying Covid “misinformation” or reporting about an “onslaught” of “toxic” content. How much space did it give the Google announcement, which touched on all these things?

347 words.

From “YouTube to Reinstate Accounts Banned Over Content Related to the Pandemic and 2020 Election”:

YouTube will create a process to reinstate the accounts of content creators whose profiles were banned in recent years because they violated rules that limited misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 election.

This is an all-time example of burying the lede. Google couldn’t have been clearer that it was not only subject to “repeated and sustained” pressure, but that the pressure involved material that “did not violate its policies.” This was particularly shocking since as noted above, Google’s policies included the entire universe of things that might “contradict” official guidance.

What could possibly not violate Google’s broad policies but still fall afoul of the Biden administration? We know from other lawsuits and investigations that the Biden White House was upset about everything from a joke meme about future vaccine lawsuits to theories about lab-leak origin to a Tucker Carlson video that Facebook said didn’t violate its policies. The world is now losing its mind over one incident involving Brendan Carr that took place in public and ended with the “victim” back on air. The Biden White House “jawboned” Facebook into reducing by 50% the traffic to a cable segment by one of the country’s most-watched newscasters:

The Carlson video that was ripped at the time as “illogical conspiracy” wondered why the Biden government was saying, in April 2021, that you still need to wear a mask or socially distance, if the vaccines work. His was one of countless reports suppressed that were not violative and contained true information. Yet America’s paper of record in the lede of its thimble-sized recognition of a years-long censorship campaign focused on accounts “banned… because they violated rules that limited misinformation.” Yes, it acknowledged “non-violative” content below, but it’s become clear that papers like the Times and public figures are bending over backward to preserve the fiction that, yes, we censored, but we did it for the right reasons.

Representative Jim Clyburn in response to the Google news said it “wasn’t the same” as the Kimmel episode, because “it was a pandemic” and we couldn’t have “foolishness” and “misinformation” going on. (Note how CNN’s Abby Phillip swerves around the “non-violative” issue as well, audibling to a line about content the Biden administration “thought was disinformation.”) Meanwhile, Jake Tapper went on The Seth Myers Show and said the Jimmy Kimmel episode “was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime”:

We’ve now moved to the stage of the Jimmy Kimmel story beyond immediate outrage and legit opposition to rank propaganda. It’s unconscionable for Tapper to say this in the same week that Google admitted submitting to “repeated and sustained” government pressure during the pandemic, pressure that happened to thousands of people instead of one and lasted years instead of days.

The pandemic speech clampdown was exactly the reason the First Amendment exists. As James Madison put it when arguing against the Alien and Sedition Acts, the state can’t use “previous restraint” to prevent criticism of its policies, because in the American system, “the people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty.” The obscenity of Clyburn’s point of view is in the idea that the state not only has the right to meddle with the press, but with the conversations between private citizens, and not just within the United States.

The sheer scale of the last Administration’s ambitions was breathtaking in this respect, and it’s only through a few lucky breaks (and the work of politicians like Jim Jordan) that we even know about the extent of it. For Tapper, ostensibly a news person, to look beyond such a vast amount of organized misconduct to pronounce the Kimmel episode the Worst Thing Ever is nuts.

The Trump Administration hasn’t exactly been a standard-bearer for speech. From Trump’s executive order on antisemitism to a deportations policy I join groups like FIRE in opposing to Carr’s unsubtle move on Disney (which counts as jawboning even if it wasn’t the reason for Kimmel’s suspension), this administration has bared fangs at the First Amendment more than once.

Even people who should know better, though, including some who were censored, seem to have forgotten what we escaped. What Google admitted to with regard to Covid, and what Meta and Twitter admitted to previously, represents the apotheosis of a decade-long effort to build a lavishly-funded, full-spectrum speech bureaucracy, whose vision included algorithmic “previous restraint” at the highest (e.g. Carlson) and most micro levels. That vision is in place in Europe, about which Google also complained (the Biden administration’s failure to help American companies resist laws like the Digital Services Act was another major offense). The hysteria over the Kimmel episode — Tapper’s CNN was breathlessly “counting down to Kimmel” before his return — has become a mechanism for burying that history. On speech, Trump just isn’t in the same universe as his predecessor, I suspect even Jake Tapper knows it, and the failure of people like him to admit it should worry anyone who cares about this issue.