By Becket Adams
Sunday, September 01, 2024
What’s the point of a press corps that’s uninterested in
the freedom of the press?
Few things in modern news media are as useless as the
journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate
news story.
There’s a lot of this going around these days.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that
the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political
content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
You’d think that journalists would be all over this story
— that, of all industries, the press would be the most outraged by Zuckerberg’s
allegations, demanding answers and explanations from the relevant government
authorities. But you’d be wrong.
“In 2021,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to House Judiciary
Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), “senior officials from the Biden
Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for
months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and
expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
Zuckerberg added, “Ultimately, it was our decision
whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including
COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this
pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we
were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with
the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Even more damning, the Silicon Valley CEO alleged that
the FBI told Facebook in 2020 that the New York Post’s exclusive
election-year reporting on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was a “potential
Russian disinformation operation.” Prompted by this warning, Facebook sent the
“story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for
a reply,” Zuckerberg said.
It would be outrageous for the FBI to claim this,
considering it had taken possession of the laptop and its contents nearly a
year before the New York Post broke the story. It was thus in a position
to verify the laptop’s authenticity and say whether the reporting was false.
So, yes, the federal government pressured a social-media
company into censoring political speech, including even jokes, according to
Zuckerberg. The same thing happened to Twitter, by the way. It’s an established
fact that the federal government intervened during the 2020 election and the
Covid crisis to “correct” Twitter’s content. We know this thanks to the “Twitter Files.”
As Joe Biden would say, this Zuckerberg letter is a “big
f***ing deal.”
Yet the media’s reaction last week was anything but
ferocious. It consisted mainly of antipathy, with a dash of outright contempt
for good measure.
“This sounds bad,” Vox seemingly conceded before
adding, “but none of this information is new.” To drive home the point, the
article insisted later, “This is not news.”
Business Insider’s Peter Kafka likewise claimed
that Zuckerberg’s allegations about the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop were old
news.
That Facebook buried the story “wasn’t a secret,” he said
during an appearance on ABC News. “Facebook had mentioned they were doing that
in real-time in October 2020, and they have subsequently apologized for it
multiple times. So there’s nothing new there.”
But the issue here isn’t that Facebook blocked the laptop
story. The social-media group did indeed announce its actions and decisions as
they happened in 2020. The issue is what federal officials did. And they did
the same when it came to Covid-related content. Hearing it alleged by Meta’s
CEO in such certain and clear language is at least a teensy bit newsworthy, no?
“Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To
Enable False GOP Narratives,” complained TechDirt.
“It’s no secret that the White House sought to
persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices,”
the article claimed, leaning precariously on an ever-preposterous pile of
euphemisms. “The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive
techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if
it failed to comply.”
Declared the Daily Beast, “Mark Zuckerberg Rolls
Over for MAGA in Groveling Letter.”
At MSNBC, “Don’t fall for Mark Zuckerberg’s
Trump-friendly suck-up.”
Remember, the crime is not the crime; it’s anything that
might help conservatives. This is where we are.
We have a federal government filled with bureaucrats who
believe it’s within their remit to silence “troublesome” speech. We have
social-media companies smart enough to know when a “request” by the feds is
actually a demand. We have an FBI willing to abuse its authority to cover up
news coverage if it’s unfavorable to certain politicians. And we have a press
corps too stupid or partisan to realize how dangerous this all is.
If federal censorship doesn’t clear the bar for
“newsworthy,” what does?
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