The New Censorship | City Journal
On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the Twitter Files, the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.
The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power what Jordan meant by weaponization.
According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a formal system to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of quasi-private organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system. Shellenberger called it the censorship-industrial complex.
The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was deamplified by Twitter meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.
At the same time, the speech police protected from criticism members in good standing of the establishment, with a special fondness for Anthony Fauci. It did that for Joe Biden, too, before and after his election to the presidency. There s no need to repeat here the sordid details of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, but given that the predicate for censorship has been the defense of truth, the bare facts of the story should be noted: the FBI lied to Twitter, and Twitter passed the lie on to the public. If it was a disinformation operation, it succeeded completely.
As Taibbi and Shellenberger observed, these maneuvers were unprecedented in the lifetimes of those assembled at the hearing. Even Joe McCarthy s anti-Communist frenzy encountered strong opposition from elements of the political and media establishment. The new censorship seemed to rely on universal elite conformity. No debates had been held, no enabling laws passed. The federal government s standing legal authority had been used to silence, in secret, the online opinions of an untold number of Americans. Whatev
These First Amendment issues bother me worse than anything else.