John D. Davidson for The Federalist:
Democrats had a tough time at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing yesterday on the censorship industrial complex.
They had to argue there was never any censorship during the Biden administration (including during Covid!) and that free speech and freedom of the press were never threatened by the partnership of government agencies with private institutions to combat "disinformation." After all, the government was just trying to catch foreign disinformation operations, they argued, so any censorship that did happen was necessary and proper.
Put another way, the censorship industrial complex never happened -- and if it did it was a good thing and the targets deserved it.At one point early on in the hearing, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., more or less came right out and said as much. While his staff displayed a large placard showing a screenshot of a piece I wrote in February 2023 about the Twitter Files -- with "NOT TRUE" stamped across the screenshot in read letters -- Welch claimed that there was nothing whatsoever to the Twitter Files story. Government funding that went to private entities for "disinformation" monitoring, he said, was actually "to help counter foreign disinformation." All the government did, in Welch's telling, was alert Twitter when users violated the company's own terms of service and community guidelines. Nothing to see here!
If anything is "NOT TRUE," it's this absurd characterization of what the Twitter Files actually revealed. Released in tranches to a group of journalists shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the Twitter Files exposed a coordinated and sustained effort by the intelligence community to co-opt and deputize social media platforms like Twitter into censoring American citizens. Basically, it was a scheme to allow the government to censor Americans in a way that would have been straightforwardly unconstitutional if the feds had tried to do it directly.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is a prime example of how this worked. Long before The New York Post published its first bombshell scoop on the laptop in October 2020 there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. Why? Because the FBI had been in possession of the laptop since the previous December when the agency seized it from a computer repair shop in Delaware. The FBI already knew the laptop contained damning evidence of the younger Biden's criminal activity ranging from illegal drug use to foreign corruption and influence-peddling on behalf of his father.
The FBI and the intelligence community knew all of this might come out ahead of the presidential election, so for months it had been priming top officials at Twitter and Facebook to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden as "hack-and-leak" operations by hostile foreign actors. The FBI had even established a special one-way communications channel with Twitter to send documents to the company about supposed foreign disinformation. As part of this setup, the FBI arranged for top Twitter officials to get special security clearances so the agency could share intelligence about possible foreign threats to the upcoming presidential election.
Of course this was all a ruse to groom and pressure Twitter into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story when it inevitably appeared, which is exactly what the company did -- along with Facebook and every major media outlet in America.
Welch was either totally unaware of this background or simply chose to clumsily misrepresent it. He was similarly dishonest or out of his depth when discussing other aspects of the censorship industrial complex, displaying an almost comical level of naiveté about how online censorship works.
Below, Mollie Hemingway testifies about "censorship tools" like Newsgard or the "Center for Countering Digital Hate" for targeting her site for an advertising boycott. The Federalist was deemed a "hate" publication for noting that the Black Lives Matter riots were not in fact "mostly peaceful," and then deemed to be engaging in disinformation for saying, of the media, "They lie, and they lie, and they lie, and then they lie some more."
She notes that 70% of the public agrees with this sentiment, stating they have little or no trust of the media.
But you can't say that and then hope that your writing will be treated like the writing of anyone else -- that is, that you can get advertising to support yourself while writing, because government-funded, government cut-out groups will starve you of any revenue until you just stop writing, Insolent Peasant.