"This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines as he overhauled his company’s 'fact-checking' operations and detailed how the Biden administration attempted to coerce social media companies into censoring posts critical of the government’s Covid response. If the company refused to comply, the Biden administration threatened to retaliate through weaponizing the judicial system, Zuckerberg explained.
'Biden administration officials used to call and scream at us demanding that we remove Covid related content, even things that were facts, or memes and humor,' he told Joe Rogan. 'When we refused, we found ourselves under investigation by several agencies.'
Zuckerberg continued:
'During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program… while they were trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true. They basically pushed us and said, you know, that ‘anything saying that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’
The forthright explanation renewed discussion of the Government’s censorship of dissidents in the Covid response, but it merely repeated information known to the Supreme Court last summer...
Justice Alito outlined scores of First Amendment abuses from the Biden administration and detailed the ways in which the White House used the threat of the regulatory state to coerce Meta, Twitter, and other companies into effectuating their censorship regime...
In 'The Censors’ Henchmen,' we outlined how Rob Flaherty, President Biden’s Director of Digital Strategy, spearheaded the White House’s clamp down on free speech, through calling and screaming at company officials to remove content, as Zuckerberg told Rogan...
Alito’s dissent... devoted pages to recounting the White House’s ongoing censorship campaign.
Justice Alito... cited how 'the White House’s emails were phrased virtually as orders and the officials’ frequent follow-ups ensured that they were understood as such'...
Alito explained that social media companies are 'far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources.' He wrote: 'If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U. S. C. §230, which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.'"