The ongoing release of the “Twitter Files” has revealed a toxic partnership between Big Tech companies and the United States government to suppress information throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election cycle.
This unholy relationship goes beyond basic partisanship. Conservatives have every reason to be outraged over how Twitter suppressed information with regards to the Hunter Biden laptop story. However, revelations from David Zweig on December 26, 2022 showed that even the Trump administration was holding weekly calls with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter to fight so-called “misinformation” on their platforms.
Zweig’s latest report showed how the current Biden administration is maintaining its pressure on Big Tech companies to suppress information from people who dare challenge conventional narratives. What we’re seeing here is Washington DC’s full-fledged assault on the right to free speech, which both parties and the unaccountable bureaucracy have facilitated.
Even worse, is the overall number of government actors involved. Journalist Matt Taibbi gave us all quite the Christmas present in his release of a series of emails showing that the State Department and “Other Government Agencies” — aka the CIA — were also involved in getting Twitter to censor and surveil content.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of the collusion between Big Tech platforms and the intelligence community.
Well-documented reports from the Daily Mail and Mint Press revealed that former members of the US intelligence community hold key positions within social media giants. Additionally, government agencies were able to pay social media platforms hefty amounts of money for “staff work” that was reportedly for agency requests. While there is no evidence of direct orders coming from the top, government agencies were able to place sufficient pressure on Twitter and other sites to censor certain information on their platforms. This allowed social media giants to bottle up legitimate speech that went against the DC regime narrative, while also crafting a regime-friendly account of events.
The Twitter Files clearly showed the FBI played an outsized role in pressuring Twitter to do its bidding. The question is: Did other government agencies follow in the FBI’s footsteps and extend their efforts to other platforms?
Thus far, we can only speculate about the degree of US administrative state involvement in social media censorship. However, the Twitter Files revelations may only scratch the surface as to how far this censorship goes.
As a private company Twitter has every right to publish whatever content it wants. However, government agencies — be they the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, or Centers of Disease Control — don’t have the right to suppress that content. There’s that special concept of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment which prevents the federal government and its bureaucratic appendages from stifling speech. Annoying as the First Amendment may sound to the Feds, it’s still the law of the land.
The Twitter Files have been a godsend in exposing the rot festering in many government agencies. However, this is only an appetizer. The FBI and its alphabet agency counterparts refuse so far to provide the main course — their correspondence with social media companies or internal communications regarding social media censorship — for obvious reasons.
Make no mistake, any form of government interference that stifles a citizen’s ability to speak and have access to differing perspectives is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. It’s going to take congressional pressure for these agencies to start fessing up to their anti-First Amendment behavior. These agencies simply won’t give up this information on their own volition.
A Congress worth its salt would investigate the depth of this collaboration to find out if other government agencies pressed Twitter and other social media giants to censor legitimate speech. Americans have every reason to suspect that the FBI-Twitter partnership was merely the tip of the iceberg as far as this collaboration was concerned.
For a country that extols the virtues of the First Amendment, such collusion between government agencies and Big Tech platforms is unacceptable. Government agencies and their functionaries who violated the First Amendment must be singled out and held to account if we want to preserve any semblance of free speech in America.
