Senator Mark Warner has aggressively gone after speech protections, seeking to seemingly single-handedly reinterpret the First Amendment while complaining that courts dealing with White House/Big Tech collusion are now making the Biden administration “very timid.”
The Democrat apparently proceeds from the rule, “disinformation is whatever we say it is” – in itself too arbitrary to be taken seriously. But that doesn’t stop Warner from building a big case for rethinking the First Amendment and facilitating censorship even further, by effectively strengthening, rather than abandoning, the said collusion.
If something is considered “true misinformation or disinformation,” the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told NPR, then that, along with another favorite yet poorly explained scare – deep fakes – does not qualify for First Amendment protections.
“I think when you’re talking about true misinformation or disinformation, or when you’re talking about utilization of deepfakes where an image…is put up and it’s not us, but it looks like us and sounds like us, I don’t think those are First Amendment protections,” is the full quote from the senator.
And Warner wants to bring some stock market rules into the world of fundamental rights and free speech, suggesting that information labeled as disinformation should be treated as malicious and banned like manipulation is banned from the stock market.
The senator then proceeded to talk about 2020 “election deniers” while in the same breath denying the integrity of the 2016 election, by once again fear-mongering about the supposed impending doom, “a perfect storm in terms of election interference.”
To stop that from happening, and to keep the current administration in power, Warner wants to make its ability to censor and keep “in contact” with the likes of Google and Facebook intact, if not stronger.
That is why he has made extra effort – penned an amicus brief – in a bid to get the Supreme Court to reverse an injunction concerning the government/Big Tech collusion, brought up in the NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton case and issued by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The senator went on to say that he “doesn’t believe” collusion of that kind has to do with free speech suppression. Instead, according to him, it has to do with “the ability of the government to be able to at least talk to Facebook and Google to say, hey, if you see misinformation – or can we share evidence of Russian activity? How do we cooperate together?”
But it seems Warner believes the US legal system, or parts of it, trying to put some breaks on this oddly undemocratic practice, are making Biden’s White House “very timid” – whereas he is “trying to push the Biden administration to be a little more aggressive.”
“But – rest assured that there is not the level of communication (with Big Tech) that existed in 2020 or 2022 or 2018,” the senator lamented.
