It’s official: Joe Biden is demanding that Facebook, the most powerful social media company in the world, interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
The presumptive Democratic nominee’s demand is shameful, cynical, and essentially redundant. As conservatives are well aware, there is already an extraordinary amount of censorship and anti-conservative bias on Facebook and its subsidiary platform, Instagram. Many of us have had our posts deleted for absurd reasons, seen our friends and favorite groups banned, or watched the content we create and enjoy get buried under an ever-growing forest of warnings, “fact-checks,” and disclaimers.
Just last month, Facebook ruthlessly censored conservative-leaning groups that were trying to organize anti-coronavirus lockdown protests, only to enthusiastically promote Black Lives Matter protest groups just weeks later, even as anarchist rioters used those demonstrations as cover for acts of political violence. Later, Breitbart articles were falsely “fact-checked” by liberal interns, presumably out of a desire to protect the public from this site’s dangerous viewpoints. The social media giant has even packed its “oversight board” with leftist “experts” who expressly reject the American concept of free speech in favor of the European “hate speech” paradigm and then try to back it up with artificial intelligence technology to automatically censor the “hate” and “harmful memes” posted by conservatives.
That’s still not enough censorship for the Biden Campaign, however.
What the Biden people want is the kind of preferential treatment they get from some of Facebook’s rivals, such as Twitter. They want the President of the United States and his supporters’ speech subjected to review by leftists and hidden behind warnings of “violence,” while insisting that leftists using social media to organize actual violence in the form of riots and looting — not to mention foreign dictators — go unmolested.
The New York Times, which broke the story of Biden’s censorship demands, also revealed the campaign team’s plan to get Facebook to go along with their desires: by emboldening the rabidly leftist mob that inhabits Silicon Valley’s corporate campuses and are already champing at the bit to force their bosses to abandon any pretense of neutrality and fairness and openly intervene in electoral politics.
“The Biden team’s offensive also intensifies pressure on Facebook, which faced a public backlash last week after it did nothing about inflammatory posts by Mr. Trump,” The Times explained. “Employees resigned, hundreds participated in a virtual walkout[.]”
What is most disturbing about the Biden Campaign’s plot, however, is that they aren’t even trying to hide their desire for censorship. Indeed, according to Biden spokesman Bill Russo, social media censorship is “necessary to protect against a repeat of the role that disinformation played in the 2016 election.”
Did you catch that? With a vague reference to the thoroughly-discredited “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, Biden’s team is asking Silicon Valley to protect their candidate from a humiliation of the sort Hillary Clinton suffered in 2016, when tens of millions of Americans fought and won the great “meme war,” bypassed the legacy media stranglehold on acceptable opinion and the information you’re “supposed” to see, and coalesced around Donald J. Trump for President.
No American who purports to believe in the value of free speech, representative government, and basic fairness can possibly tolerate this. To surrender to Joe Biden’s demands would be to surrender this country’s most cherished ideals.
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