Not content to merely censor public speech — including scientific opinion and even news reports — the Biden White House has now been caught pressuring the world’s largest social media platform into censoring private messages between individuals.
The White House scrambled to defend its short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, which was launched early last year to censor what it believed was misinformation.
They dissolved it four months later on Aug. 24 following public protest.
But now author and investigative journalist David Zweig stumbled upon to something far more sinister in his Twitter Files research — the censoring of private messages.
"The Biden White House pressured Meta to moderate 'vaccine-skeptical' content on WhatsApp," Zweig said.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook.
WhatsApp is a private messaging service.
"This is fundamentally different from social media, since WhatsApp is used for private communication,” he continued. "My report, based on legal documents obtained through discovery."
Zweig, by the way, is not some wild-eyed, far-right would-be insurrectionist.
He’s written almost exclusively for liberal mainstream publications, including The New York Times, New York magazine, The Atlantic and Wired.
Biden wasted no time going after private messages, according to emails that were obtained through discovery in Missouri v Biden, a First Amendment case brought by two state attorneys general.
"As early as January 26, 2021, almost immediately after Biden took office, communications between the White House and Meta were underway regarding content moderation," Zweig wrote.
"Of specific concern was vaccine hesitancy and how Meta would combat this across its multiple platforms, including Facebook and Instagram."
The First Amendment absolutely prohibits government at any level from censoring or otherwise "moderating" public information. But Zweig reported that it soon got worse — a lot worse.
"[A]mid the copious correspondence that I reviewed about those platforms, something jumped out at me: repeated queries about another Meta property, WhatsApp, a service designed for private messaging," he reported.
Imagine in the middle of a private telephone conversation with a friend, if someone were to come on the line and say "you can’t talk about that," and then disconnected the phone call.
Despite pressure from the White House there was little Meta could do to moderate private messages.
"The exchanges about WhatsApp are arresting not because of what Meta ultimately did or did not do on the platform," Zweig continued, "but because efforts to moderate content on a private messaging service was a continued interest for a White House official at all."
As for the Disinformation Governance Board, we only have the administration’s word that it was disbanded, and information is now surfacing that it may be continuing under different names.
Matt Taibbi, another author and independent journalist, has been at the center of the Twitter Files investigation that revealed the connection between government and social media.
He agreed that Biden’s push for a Disinformation Governance Board was “terrifying,” but claims it’s not necessarily dead.
"They continued to have something called the MDM Subcommittee," Taibbi said Sunday. "Just last week they essentially announced that they were no longer going to have that — the Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation Subcommittee. But there’s another subcommittee coming up behind it that I think may inherit the same mantle that the Governance Board was supposed to have."
In addition, they even target "true stories that might promote hesitancy or true stories of vaccine side effects.
"So we now know that a lot of these anti-disinformation programs, whether they're actual state agencies or whether they're NGOs that are state-funded, they're targeting true information that just happens to be counter-narrative, which I think is extremely dangerous."
Like Zweig, Taibbi considers himself a liberal.
As the federal government has become bigger, it’s taken over more of our lives — most often in the name of a clean environment.
First they added catalytic converters to our cars, which increased the cost and robbed horsepower. At about the same time an American favorite seemed to disappear from the landscape — muscle cars.
Then, after a century of loyal service, Thomas Edison’s most famous invention — the incandescent light bulb — was declared a menace.
They were replaced with compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDs. They use less energy but lack the warm glow Edison gave us.
Then they went after our toilets and fiddled with our shower pressure.
Now our gas stoves and washing machines are in their crosshairs.
But to achieve total control of a society, they know they need to control the information and ban the private ownership of firearms.
Although neither has been completely achieved, both are at the top of Biden’s bucket list.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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