And for the Jacinda regime in NZ too, of course…
A leaked Facebook email from 2021 written by Nick Clegg, the company’s president of Global Affairs, to colleagues, reads: “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” adding “We shouldn’t have done it.”
As Matt Taibbi of Racket News writes: In the Facebook Files release, it came out that Facebook, in its desperation to cool down these White House apes, promised to reduce traffic to Carlson’s video by 50% while it was “in the queue to be fact-checked”!
Apart from the obvious, why was this insane? Because while the White House fumed and outlets like the Washington Post excoriated Carlson for a “just asking questions… shtick,” it turned out he was asking the right questions. Why, if the vaccine worked, was Anthony Fauci telling people they shouldn’t “attend medium to large gatherings” or remove masks?
“If vaccines work,” Carlson asked, “why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives?” Similarly: why was Justin Trudeau saying, “Vaccination on its own isn’t enough to keep us safe,” if the shot worked? Maybe, Carlson speculated, the vaccine doesn’t work?
These were obvious and appropriate questions, but officials and journalists alike attacked Carlson for them anyway.
Representative Jim Jordan came out with a series of released and unredacted emails provided to a Congressional committee from Facebook (full Facebook Files below), showing the massive pressure the White House and other entities put on the social media giant during the pandemic.The purpose was to quash narratives and even memes that the White House took umbrage with.This has become all too familiar.As Summit News’ Steve Watson reports, Rep. Jordan spoke out on Fox News after releasing the documents were released proving that the Biden administration pressured Meta to aggressively censor Americans expressing opinions they disagreed with on Facebook and Instagram.
“They knew it was wrong,” Jordan told Fox News host Laura Ingraham, adding:“One of those Facebook executives said ‘This is a significant incursion into the boundaries of free expression.’ That is a fancy way of saying this violates the First Amendment for goodness sake.”
The executive Jordan was referring to is Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs.
“The White House was outraged, because Jen Psaki stood there at the podium what you played, in the White House and demanded this happen because the White House was demanding it and they wanted to keep their cozy relationship with the Biden Administration, they censored First Amendment speech,” Jordan continued.
The Congressman also referred to a Federal Judge issuing a recent injunction to put a stop to the Biden Administration acting like an “Orwellian Ministry Of Truth” by colluding with big tech to censor opinions it doesn’t like, much to the disliking of the establishment media.
“We had that great federal court decision on July 4th in the Western District of Louisiana, great decision,” Jordan said, adding “So, I don’t think it’s going on now. But we got make sure it doesn’t go on in the future, it doesn’t happen because we have this amazing thing in greatest country ever called the First Amendment.”
Jordan continued, “Rand Paul and I have introduced legislation… which would say if you are in the government and doing what was happening there, you get fired, you don’t get your pension benefits, there could be civil liability that you are subject to, you lose any security clearance you may have.”
“We want real penalties for people in the government engaging what Professor [Jonathan] Turley called this censorship by surrogate,” Jordan added.
In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post.
What did the Biden White House want removed? A meme. That’s right, even memes weren’t spared from the Biden White House’s censorship efforts.
When Clegg “countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment.
What happened next? Facebook panicked. In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook’s VP of public policy, raised the concern that Slavitt’s challenge felt “very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days.”
This wasn’t the first time that the Biden White House was angry that Facebook didn’t censor more. According to these documents, the Biden White House demanded to know why Facebook had not censored a video from @TuckerCarlsonSo, Facebook prepped its response.To appease the Biden White House, talking points were drafted for Clegg. Facebook was ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50 percent in response to the White House’s demands, even though the post didn’t violate any policies.