When the government censors free speech

Last week White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted to something that should give all Americans pause.

She said the Biden administration was closely following posts on social media that were related to COVID-19.

She claimed that the posts were forms of misinformation — with 65 percent coming from the same 12 people — and that they’ve contacted social media groups like Facebook to urge them to remove the information or ban the users.

Should this concern you? Yes. While there’s no denying there’s a sickening amount of false information about COVID (and everything else) floating around the internet these days, any time government begins to conspire with its largest corporations to limit any American’s freedom, it should raise a red flag. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.

The First Amendment is the bedrock of liberty and freedom. Without that amendment, much of the change that exists in America today wouldn’t be here.

In fact, it’s the very idea of the First Amendment that we see on display in Cuba as people fight for change in their country.

Free speech is every human being’s basic right, as the founders understood two and a half centuries ago.

In fact, the First Amendment expressly protects unpopular speech, because nobody ever tries to ban popular speech.

If we saw the Cuban people on the streets hailing the Cuban government and denouncing America, does anyone think they’d be beaten in the streets as they are today? No, because nobody tries to ban popular speech.

Social media giants essentially used the First Amendment as the launching pad for their massive corporations that infiltrate every part of our lives today.

That freedom from government regulations that allowed their users to say whatever they want is what built Facebook and Twitter. They became a national town square.

In fact, the social media giants argued if they were subject to restrictions that are applied to say, newspapers, television, or radio, they never would have gotten started.

Why? Liability. They argued they couldn’t possibly fact-check every post.

Now, it seems, they can. You might wonder why something said by the president’s press secretary might be worthy of an opinion. It’s because the First Amendment is an individual liberty, belonging to every one of us.

And if the government can conspire with social media outlets to prevent Americans from having opinions — no matter how wrong they may be — it can affect our very business.

Can newspapers, television, and radio expect similar calls for what essentially is censorship of its customers?

It’s not unusual for government agencies to want to use media companies to get the word out. But it’s another thing to join forces with those media companies to limit the voice of the people who are accessing those media companies.

And that brings us back to Jen Psaki. She also said that information changes and she’s right, it does — particularly with COVID-19. (Let’s not forget that just last year many leading Democrats sounded pretty wary of a COVID-19 vaccination when Donald Trump was the guy assuring us they’d be safe. If anyone dared suggest such a thing about the safety of the vaccines on social media today, they’d be fact-checked in a heartbeat.)

Also just over a year ago, social media giants and other media organizations labeled the Wuhan Lab-leak theory as misinformation, but now it has currency with the U.S. government, and a majority of Americans believe it is likely.

The question now is what the impact of stifling that speech had on getting to the bottom of that issue? If all the media had spent more time investigating the claim, rather than suppressing it, would we have a clearer understanding of the origin?

We don’t know, but we do know that stifling speech didn’t help. And the fact the White House press secretary so matter-of-factly said they’re still doing it should be of concern to every American.