Should note:
The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Facebook "began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content" before the government pressure campaign began, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for the posts being taken down.
Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.
> unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this
"We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]
Correct, the choice was theirs. They probably didn't want to keep spreading ivermectin conspiracy theories, it's bad for advertisers.
And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others?
Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contracts, vaccine side-effects, vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, natural immunity discussion, etc etc etc; all restricted and suppressed to fit whatever the Biden admin decided.
That's not hyperbole, that's simple and well documented fact. And, as was directly pointed out in this letter/article, the Biden admin wasn't above using lies to shut down politically inconvenient (and true) stories.
The Facebook case was then refiled by Biden's FTC pick Lina Khan in 2021, and made "more robust and detailed than before". [0]
Khan (who was fast-tracked to the position) also went after Microsoft and Google during the same period. [0] And Twitter. Some of those cases could have begun earlier too - what's important is that all those cases were active while Biden's admin was making "requests".
The Biden admin had a massive stick to wave at the tech giants, regardless of who started each lawsuit and when, and demonstrated both the power to make judgments and to easily make problems go away [1]:
> “You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials. Why are you losing so much?” demanded California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at a House oversight hearing this summer. “Are you losing on purpose?”
> ...
> In her interview with CNN, Khan said she was “quite happy” with the FTC’s merger work
All the leverage was sitting right there for any request from Biden to have a lot of implied 'stick' behind it.
Companies consented to remove content without looking too deeply at it, and a lot of problems went away. I guess that could be a coincidence, but the giant 9+ figure lawsuits would certainly be worth a mention, no?
* * *
0 - https://www.vox.com/2021/8/19/22632826/facebook-ftc-lawsuit-...
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/16/tech/lina-khan-risk-taker...