To most Americans, the biggest surprise of the week wasn’t that social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms had interfered in past elections. The shock was that he admitted it. In a blockbuster letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the young face of Meta even seemed contrite about following the Biden-Harris administration’s orders. But the question now is, what do we do about it?
“I believe the government pressure was wrong,” the 40-year-old tycoon said candidly, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken.” The acknowledgment that senior White House officials had “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor” content in 2021 confirmed what most people already suspected: the corrupt arms of the Left at the highest pinnacles of power were putting their thumb on the scales of democracy and silencing free speech.
“Like I said to our teams at the time,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.” In one of the letter’s more major declarations, the tech giant also agreed to stop making contributions — the controversial “Zuckerbucks” scam — to supposedly support “election infrastructure this November.” That news was cheered by House Republicans as a major win, since several jurisdictions complained of the dark money influence that no one could hold accountable.
It’s exactly the sort of pass-through money scheme that Democrats claimed in past years to oppose. And because of the way his cash network was structured, Zuckerberg’s hundreds of millions of dollars completely bypassed the routine nonprofit disclosures. “It’s a brilliant way to move money from foundations, which are usually shy [about] being perceived as too political. They want to be seen as more highbrow and philanthropic… to abortion campaigns for instance.” They can do this electioneering and campaigning without admitting the kind of organization they are — and with the help of the IRS’s very generous tax exemptions and deductions. “It’s not done out in the open. It’s not done with most people’s knowledge. It’s very insidious,” Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center argued at the time.
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The outcry over the Meta founder’s influence in thousands of local communities was so great that almost 30 states flat-out banned or restricted “Zuck bucks” from impacting their elections again.
As for the censorship, it wasn’t just COVID “misinformation” that Meta suppressed but earth-shattering revelations like the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Zuckerberg also confessed to subduing — an act that may well have tipped the White House to Hunter’s father’s favor.
And while his openness is welcome, “It’s too little too late, quite frankly,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Tuesday. “… I get what Zuckerberg is trying to do. He’s trying to say, ‘Well, mea culpa, you know.’ But he waited, oddly enough, for several years. But we all knew what was going on. … They’re trying to say that this was a result of government. And if it was a result of ‘government,’ which I believe it was, then we need to go in and rattle the chains of government. We can’t just say, ‘Hey, this is a big victory for the First Amendment that somebody finally admitted [this],’ but nobody [is] being held accountable. And that’s what needs to happen here — not just saying mea culpa. Somebody has to be held accountable.”
The editors of National Review absolutely agree, pointing out that the real travesty is Biden’s bulldozing of the First Amendment. This, “clearly, is not how the federal government should be behaving toward the free speech of its citizens. That those demands were made — and that resistance to them was treated as it was — is a sign that something went very wrong.”
Of course, the White House claimed that the “deadly pandemic” superseded Americans’ rights and made the decision that protecting “public health and safety” justified their criminal demands. “But, as Mark Zuckerberg confirmed, the Biden team’s habit went far beyond a desire to save lives,” NR’s editors argue. “Confirming that Facebook had throttled accurate reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg apologized for that, too. … What, one wonders, would the Biden campaign claim was its unselfish justification for that?”
As Biggs reiterated, “They knew [the Hunter Biden laptop scoop] was real … a year before the election. So the bottom line is the White House was actually threatening people and leveraging their power against people who are regulated by the White House and the Executive Branch. That is a violation of the First Amendment. And quite frankly, if you were censored, you should have a claim now under the First Amendment. And the reality is they own this. The White House owns this.”
And while voters can hold this administration accountable at the ballot box, what will happen to the magnate of Meta? “He finally admitted what we knew all along,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) told Hice Wednesday. “He violated the First Amendment. He kowtowed [again to] the progressive Democrats — or Democrats in general — to suppress information. But the problem is, what was his consequence? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. And that’s what Congress must do, is we must put protections in place that hold these social media companies accountable for their actions.” Not only that, she underscored, but “We have to begin to put protections [in place] for the average citizens, so these media companies cannot exploit … what they’re doing for political purposes. That’s what we need to do. We need to revise some of these protections that these social media companies enjoy.”
She’s referring, of course, to the problematic Section 230 of the 1996 federal Telecommunications Act. When Bill Clinton signed the bill into law almost 30 years ago, the world was just getting used to the internet. There was no Twitter or Facebook — no YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Even Google was a full two years away. Nobody could have predicted this thing called social media. Now, a generation later, America has a cutting-edge world that we’re still trying to govern with stuffy, outdated laws. And the explosion of censorship is letting us know — it’s not working.
Back when lawmakers thought the internet would be another public square where people could talk freely, they decided to make these platforms immune from the kinds of lawsuits other media face.
Over time, though, companies stopped using this part of the law as a shield and started using it as a weapon to choke off speech and get away with it. Thousands of conservatives know this from experience, if Twitter suspends your account or if YouTube takes down your video because they don’t like pro-life messages, there’s really nothing you can do about it. Section 230 means these companies can silence you for any reason and never be held accountable. It’s the opposite of the traditional media, where any newspaper that prints something untrue or slanderous can be sued. When Congress inserted those 26 words of the law, they were assuming that Big Tech wouldn’t put their finger on the scales. Years later, we know: it’s not just their fingers on the scales — but the entire social media universe.
Leaders like Biggs, McClain, and so many others believe it’s time to stop giving these companies a free pass and start holding them accountable for picking political sides. We can’t continue to have four of the biggest companies in the world picking and choosing winners in a marketplace where they have unlimited power. “We need to get rid of Section 230, which allows these platforms to have protection and immunity. We need to go after that. Change that,” the Arizonan insisted. “If you never hold anybody accountable and you just say, ‘Well, thanks for apologizing, we’re going to be nice to you,’ then you don’t deter anybody else or any other bad actor.”
LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
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