House Subcommittee joins legal case against WH over media censorship

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
8 Aug 2023 19:38

A Republican Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives backs a lawsuit accusing Biden's administration of colluding with big tech to censor Covid-related social media posts.

US President Joe Biden speaks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States on March 31, 2021 (AFP)

The administration of US President Joe Biden is under legal fire after a House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government supported a lawsuit accusing the government of colluding with social media and tech giants to censor free speech, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told Fox News on Tuesday.

Members of the judiciary's Subcommittee on Government Weaponization filed a brief on Monday in the Missouri vs. Biden case, along with the “smoking gun documents,” which, according to the group, reveal the role of Biden's administration in coercing Meta's Facebook to censor information related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The extensive investigation of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has uncovered smoking gun documents showing how Big Tech and Big Government worked together to stifle free speech online," Jordan said.

Last July, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered top Biden administration officials and agencies not to contact social media platforms to block speakers and opinions they disagree with.

The decision came in a case brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that the Biden administration was attempting to muzzle viewpoints and speakers who questioned its Covid policies and the legality of the 2020 election.

US courts are increasingly being requested to serve as arbiters in disputes over social media content, which has become increasingly controversial.

Conservatives allege that the platforms limit their ideas, while Liberals argue that the platforms do not do enough to remove false, misleading, and harmful content.

Republican legislators have shifted their focus away from antitrust measures to address concerns about social media content and toward probing what they call conservative censorship.

One of the first legislative efforts in this direction was made earlier this year by the chairs of the Oversight and Accountability, Energy and Commerce, and Judiciary committees, who claimed that Biden administration officials and other Democrats had pressured social media platforms to remove politically inconvenient content.

Covid 'fiasco'

One famous example of censoring on social media is regarding the Coronavirus pandemic, which was censored on so many social media platforms.

In June, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said Facebook was asked by the scientific "establishment" to remove several posts about Covid-19 that afterward turned out to be "debatable or true."

In a podcast discussion with the interviewer Lex Fridman that was made public on June 11, Zuckerberg admitted that the monitoring of Facebook's efforts to delete untruths is "really tricky".

"Just take some of the stuff around Covid earlier on in the pandemic," Zuckerberg explained, "where there were real health implications but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions," adding that "unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts," he continued.