The Biden administration’s intervention in Facebook’s content moderation, and Facebook’s compliance, was a grotesque violation of the American civic compact.
A quote in the Wall Street Journal attributable to a vice president of Facebook in charge of content moderation reads as follows: “The [White House] has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed . . .”
There’s more to that quote, and the additional context renders it far more nefarious. What needed to be “removed,” according to the White House, were posts on the social-media outlet with jokes “premised on the vaccine having side effects.” This Facebook VP added that they took the Biden administration’s dictate further based on the impression that it “would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed.” It is, however, worth isolating the first part of this sentence so as to distill down to its essence the pettiness of the Biden administration’s authoritarian impulses.
The violation of fundamental American civic principles in the administration’s demand should have been obvious. The utter legal impotency of the imperative imposed on them from the White House should have been self-evident. The utter humorlessness of the scolds who seek to interdict not just the activities of private enterprises but individual thought patterns should have rendered the administration’s demands the object of scorn and mockery. But that is not what happened.
According to the Journal’s report, which is based on documents obtained by House Republican investigators, the Biden administration put enough pressure on Facebook to convince its executives that it was in their interests to censor humor that mocked a White House initiative. The proper — indeed, American — response to a demand like that should be “Go to hell.” For a company with a multibillion-dollar valuation and an army of attorneys on retainer, there are no excuses.
It is irrelevant that the initiative in question related to an acute national emergency. The efficacy of Covid vaccines or their capacity to create the conditions necessary to discontinue pandemic-related restrictions on social and economic life is not pertinent. Congress shall make no law, and the executive branch must not abridge, the right of Americans to engage in lawful self-expression. Why was this essential principle subordinated to the demands made by the White House’s temporary occupants? The Journal posits a theory, albeit a speculative one. “Facebook at the time was hoping to facilitate an agreement between U.S. and European officials allowing user data to flow across the Atlantic in compliance with privacy laws,” the report read.
The Journal leaves it up to readers to draw their own conclusions, so allow me: This enterprise believed the administration would use its regulatory authority to hurt the firm’s bottom line if it did not contribute to the White House’s goal. It wasn’t exactly strong-armed, though. Facebook’s staff was only slightly more mistrustful of the rubes on their own platform services than they were enamored of their own enlightened competency. They didn’t need to be cajoled into doing the White House’s bidding. They were willing participants.
It fell to Nick Clegg, of all people, a one-time British politician with the Liberal Democrats, to inform his colleagues of the American legal conventions their practices violated. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” he asked his colleagues. “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” the VP responded. “We shouldn’t have done it.” No, you shouldn’t have. “I can’t see Mark [Zuckerberg] in a million years being comfortable with removing that—and I wouldn’t recommend it,” Clegg said, in an admonition of his censorious colleagues.
How humiliating. How unacceptable. Worse still, the White House doesn’t appear to evince any of the shame Facebook’s executives expressed. When asked for comment on these revelations, the administration cited a remark made by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday: “We have consistently made it clear that we believe social-media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people,” she said, “while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms.”
The White House’s looming presence over the internal debates ongoing inside Facebook’s content-moderation machine ensured that they did not and could not make “independent decisions.” The Biden administration’s intervention into this process ensured that. The whole affair is a grotesque violation of the American civic compact. The fact that the president’s mere will was sufficient to compel private actors to attack wit and satire — that most roguish of checks on the mystique of the powerful — is nothing less than totalitarian.
Everyone involved in this debacle deserves to be shamed out of public life.