Where is the Justice Department's investigation?
It seems like egregious overstepping. Remember when Qwest refused the FBI requests to phone data and we all hailed them for sticking to principles when ATT and the rest just said "yessirs!"
It is a stickier than that though - I imagine Facebook fears regulation, not criminal prosecution. And if so, perhaps that fear led to the act of self-censorship. Can the government unconstitutionally suppress free speech via the threat of regulation? I personally don't think so.
The optics around this interaction are extremely unethical. Whether or not there was any actual legal pressure is only half of the issue. The other half is the appearance of unethical behavior.
Companies like Facebook fear regulation the most. Their goal is to just stay under the radar of the government and keep making money.
Not surprised in the least that they’d “follow the FBI’s suggestion” in order to buy some good Will on other fronts.
1. the article clearly states the FBI did not specifically mention the Biden story.
2. It's odd to then claim they followed the FBI's suggestion to "buy good will" on other fronts. (Unclear how FBI goodwill would help, if your statement about Facebook "fearing regulation the most" is true).
3. Regardless, the FBI is part of the executive branch - it does not prosecute nor regulate. On a related point, the FBI is alleged (not necessarily proven) to be right/conservative-leaning. So it's a strange suggestion the FBI were trying to somehow pressure Facebook to censor anti-Biden media, at least based on what we know about the agency. It could be true, but would require some backing evidence as the FBI is "supposed" to be apolitical, but if anything it has been criticized for leaning conservative.
4. You single out "Companies like Facebook" as the issue, but the article states the Washington Post and New York Times actually tried to imply the New York Post article and emails were false (only to later acknowledge "some" emails were authentic).
It's not clear to me that social media restricting an article is the primary issue, vs. prominent news outlets which are trusted as a primary source by millions of voters, claiming an article was disinformation, only later to actually perform an investigation and acknowledge it was true.
Both things of course are highly problematic. But it seems reasonable to assume if the major news outlets didn't claim the story was disinformation, it would've been less likely to have been incorrectly censored as disinformation by social media platforms who were warned by the FBI about Russian disinformation.
I've been in the C-suite when concerns about government regulation have been discussed. You "play ball" on some things in order to avoid other, worse things happening.
I have no idea if Zuckerberg made this trade-off.
I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the strategy.
It's not like Facebook wasn't already in the hot seat when it came to Congress.
There’s still no right to publish statements on Facebook enshrined in the Constitution.
I think the better reason is that they never actually told Meta to suppress the story, and I'm not sure if there was a stick to ensure that they'd do it.
Another selective enforcement example; anyone remember when Fife Symington took the National Guard to the Grand Canyon during the federal shutdown? Convicted of accounting malfeasance, for practices that every developer in the modern world uses to pay the bills between project payments.
Trump, well let's agree he's no angel, but he is the primary focus of the latest vendetta from the deep state. Anyone who harms or endangers the deep state will be subjected to this kind of attack. No conspiracy theories, required.
The First Amendment prevents Congress from passing laws abridging freedom of speech, press and assembly, or creating a state religion. That's all it does.
The government, in this case, simply made a general suggestion about policy to Facebook, which they chose to act upon of their own accord. That's perfectly legal. Scummy, perhaps, but not a First Amendment violation (unless of course SCOTUS were to decide otherwise.)
The FBI telling Facebook "This is False Information, Censor it" absolutely violates many peoples first amendment rights by way of Tortious interference.
But that isn't what happened, according to the article. So even if you're correct, it doesn't apply in this case.