Part One of this op-ed chronicled studies about apparent blood clot side-effects of COVID vaccines. I ended with questions about why that information was not widely disseminated.
Part Two suggests an answer to that question.
On September 14, Chris Cox (CPO of Facebook) testified under oath that Facebook worked with the Biden administration to censor COVID information – which certainly seems to violate the First Amendment.
Cox claimed that because Facebook is a private company, the constitutional First Amendment protection of free speech from government censorship doesn’t apply to them. While it is true that Amendment is intended to apply only to the government, let’s explore the validity of that claim under this scenario.
That exploration first takes us to Ernesto Miranda, a career criminal from Arizona whose claim to everlasting fame is that he is the “Miranda” of the Miranda vs Arizona case which introduced “Miranda warnings” into our cultural lexicon. In 2000, the Supreme Court noted that Miranda had “become part of our national culture”. (They are Miranda “warnings” not “rights’, but that is a topic for another time.)
That famous 1966 case placed restrictions on how police can interrogate arrested citizens. Almost since Miranda was decided police have being using ploys to get around it. One such is to utilize non-law enforcement people to engage in interrogation of an accused citizen that officers themselves can’t do without violating the tenets of Miranda.
Courts don’t respond well to such ploys, and reacted by applying the long established legal doctrine of “agency” to thwart them. The have held that “an accused’s rights apply when questioned by an agent of law enforcement”.
An “agent” is (according to Black’s Law Dictionary) “One who is authorized to act for or in place of another” that “other” is the “principal”. An “apparent agent” is one who “appears to have authority to act for another regardless of whether actual authority has been conferred.”
A police agent can be a snitch placed in a jail cell with an accused to elicit incriminating statements. Or it can be an accused’s family member co-operating with police. In both scenarios, the accused’s constitutional rights restrict the agent just as they do the law enforcement principal.
So it is well-established that constitutional rights apply to government agents – both actual and apparent ones. Which brings us back to Facebook.
If Facebook (as Chris Cox testified) worked in conjunction with the Biden administration to censor COVID information, then Facebook was an agent of the government – and the First Amendment applies to the former just as it does to the latter. That is reflected in the comment at the end by Senator Hawley (a lawyer) about the significance of Cox’s testimony in a pending lawsuit. That testimony could also lead to lawsuits, for violation of First Amendment rights, by anyone whose Facebook account was blocked because of their contrarian views of vaccines.
But there is a more sinister term for this sort of censorship at the behest of the government. It’s called fascism.
A definition of Facism is “A way of organizing a society in which a government controls the lives of the people – and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.”
Three characteristics of fascism are:
1) A co-operation between government and private corporations (ie, Facebook and the Biden administration). One of the foremost fascists in history, Benito Mussolini said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power!” ;
2) Identification of an enemy as a unifying cause. In 1920s Italy it was the communists. In 1930s Germany it was the Jews. In Orwell’s novel 1984 (published in 1949), it was Emmanuel Goldstein, a former member of the ruling party. In 2022, according to Joe Biden, it is “MAGA republican semi-fascists”. The identity of the “enemy” changes, but the underlying political theory doesn’t.
3) Media are directly, or indirectly, controlled by the government to censor what information is disseminated to the populace. National Socialist Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels mastered modern techniques of social manipulation through control of the media, and censorship of opposing ideas. He said “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play!” Facebook is the modern version of the Goebbels’- era press.
In defining so-called “defense mechanisms” Sigmund Freud formulated the concept of “projection” meaning “attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another”. President Biden, and other democrats have of late been referring to anyone who disagrees with them as “fascists”. The Biden administration’s use of Facebook to censor information about COVID suggests their use of the term fascist to describe their opponents is classic Freudian projection.
After writing the above column there has been a new development in the social media censorship/first amendment debate. It appears the Supreme Court will decide the issue.
Following Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump’s account, Florida and Texas enacted laws prohibiting social media platforms from censoring users based on political viewpoint. The Florida law was previously struck down by a federal appeals court, a decision under appeal to the United States Supreme Court. That the Supreme Court will hear that appeal just became more likely.
A different federal appeals court has upheld the Texas law. So now there is a “conflict between circuits” which only the Supreme Court can resolve.
The Texas decision came after Facebook’s Cox’s Senate testimony. Though it’s unlikely that testimony influenced the Texas decision, it will be interesting to see if it will be a factor for the Supreme Court since there is no longer any question that Facebook acted as a agent of the government when it censored COVID information.