During a hearing on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government,” Democrats continued their long-standing tradition of downplaying or denying evidence of the Biden administration pressuring Big Tech platforms to censor Americans, despite numerous examples of this censorship collusion being provided during the hearing.
The “weaponization” at the center of the hearing included the federal government’s funding of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be “used by governments and Big Tech to monitor and censor speech at scale.” However, the hearing also cited many other examples of censorship, including former Biden admin officials demanding content takedowns, DHS-linked teams censoring 2020 election-related online speech, Biden admin agencies awarding multi-million dollar grants to entities researching AI-censorship tools, and the Biden White House pressuring Amazon to censor books that were skeptical of Covid-19 vaccines.
Yet, several Democrats either argued that the Biden admin either didn’t violate the First Amendment when engaging in this activity or that the censorship at the center of this hearing “doesn’t exist.”
Norman Eisen, the former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Barack Obama, framed those concerned about the Biden admin violating the First Amendment as crying wolf and supported the Supreme Court’s decision to stay an injunction that had prevented the Biden admin from communicating with Big Tech about posts that the administration deems to be harmful.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) claimed that the evidence of federal government censorship pressure was “projection” and that the government weaponization that Republicans were focused on “doesn’t exist.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) cited testimony from witnesses behind closed doors to push the idea that “the government has never coerced, pressured, or threatened any social media company into taking any action” and that this is a “theory” that “falls apart.”
You can watch the full hearing here.
