Senior officials in the Biden administration, including some White House officials, "conducted repeated and sustained outreach" and "pressed" Google- and YouTube parent-company Alphabet "regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate [Alphabet's] policies," the company revealed yesterday.
While Alphabet "continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press [Alphabet] to remove non-violative user-generated content," a lawyer for Alphabet wrote in a September 23 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Administration officials including Biden "created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions" of private tech platforms regarding the moderation of misinformation.
The company will now restore the accounts of certain content creators removed as part of efforts to tamp down on misinformation related to COVID-19 or the 2020 presidential election. "YouTube will prove an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the letter said.
These announcements came in response to Judiciary Committee subpoenas sent as part of the committee's investigation into government efforts to "weaponize" tech companies to suppressing disfavored speech.
Jordan has been crowing about both Alphabet's admissions and its pledge to reinstate creators whom he described on X as being "censored for political speech" on YouTube. "This is another victory in the fight against censorship," Jordan posted.
I agree. Some have defended the Biden administration's pressure on social media companies, saying that since it only amounted to suggestions and requests—not demands—and that it was fair game. But when those suggestions and requests come amid a bevy of bills aimed at big tech companies, a slew of congressional hearings where lawmakers excoriated big tech, pledges by the administration to use antitrust laws to break up big tech companies (and follow through there from both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission), and condemnation from the highest levels of government—including the president—it's hard to take seriously the idea that this was just friendly and harmless repertoire. At the very least, it's easy to imagine how tech companies might have taken the Biden administration's comments as more than mere requests.
This is what has come to be known as "jawboning," and the fact that it doesn't involve direct censorship may make it even more insidious. Direct censorship can be challenged in court. This sort of wink-and-nod regulation of speech leaves companies and their users with little recourse.
All of that being said, the Biden administration's attempts to pressure private companies into doing their bidding with regard to free speech seems quite quaint in comparison to what the Trump administration has been doing.
Just yesterday—the same day that Jordan pledged that Congressional Republicans would "not stop fighting for free speech"—the Republican president, Donald Trump, threatened to sue ABC for putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air.
Kimmel's show was indefinitely suspended by ABC following comments from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr, who suggested that the FCC would take action if companies didn't pull Kimmel. "I mean, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way," Carr told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson. "These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead." Carr went on to say that broadcasters could face fines or license revocation if they didn't act.
First, Nexstar—which owns myriad local TV stations and is seeking approval from the Trump administration to merge with Tegna—said it would replace Kimmel's show on the ABC affiliates it owns. Then ABC announced that "Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely" across the nation.
The Republican spin has been that private companies independently decided to get rid of Kimmel, and that this couldn't be described as censorship because neither the FCC or any other government actor had directly taken action.
But even if Carr didn't directly order any actions here, his comments are a pretty clear threat. The same goes for Trump's comments with regard to Kimmel and other late-night TV hosts.
At the very least, this is jawboning several orders of magnitude above what we saw from the Biden administration. It's certainly not the behavior of an administration or a party that rejects censorship or respects the First Amendment. And it represents just one of many similar attempts by the Trump administration to directly or indirectly censor free speech.
With all that the Trump administration and other Republicans are doing right now to erode the First Amendment and create a climate of free speech fear, it may seem silly to still care about some pressure put on social media companies by a previous administration. But bigger wrongs being done now don't make previous wrongs right, of course.
What's more, each time authorities stray from the spirit of the First Amendment, it makes it that much easier for future authorities to do so. And each time Democrats (or Republicans) use government power to try and suppress free speech, it gives them even less standing to say it's wrong when their opponents do that while also giving their opponents room to suggest they're only doing the same thing that's been done before by the other side.
"It's called soft power. The Left uses it all the time," Johnson posted after asserting that Carr's comments are indeed what got Kimmel canceled. "Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well."
Biden administration jawboning of Alphabet and other big tech companies was bad in its own right, of course. But it's also having a long tail of badness.
The Biden administration's actions do not justify what the Trump administration is doing now. But for a lot of Republican leaders and MAGA faithful, they provide perfect cover to undertake or cheer their side doing the same—and much more.
More Sex & Tech News
• ICE helps arrest sex workers, again. Once again, Florida's Polk County has padded its "human trafficking sting" arrest numbers by arresting hundreds of sex workers and people seeking their services. Once again, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were involved.
• A national security threat—or a simple scamming operation? Robert Graham at Cybersect makes a case for the latter, contradicting claims from the Secret Service and major news organizations. "This looks like a normal criminal SIM farm, that's used for a wide range of purposes, often SMS spam," writes Graham. "They are pretending to be thousands of normal mobile phone users to prevent the mobile phone companies from shutting them down. Some miscreant likely used the service to hide the origin of threats sent as SMS messages to politicians, which is why the Secret Service is involved. Theres [sic] no evidence the Secret Service is involved due to some actual national security or espionage threat — that's just propaganda they are hyping."
• "We've been wrong about new technology before. Are we wrong about AI?" asks Dylan Matthews at Vox. The piece contains this tidbit: "If the number of messages sent to it keeps growing at the current pace, there will be more ChatGPT queries than Google searches by the end of next year."
• Human error fuels self-driving car crashes: A large majority of crashes involving autonomous car company Waymo "were clearly not Waymo's fault, including 24 crashes where the Waymo wasn't moving at all and another 7 where the Waymo was rear-ended by another vehicle," notes Kai Williams at Understanding AI.
• Judge tosses tribe's "porn addiction" defamation claims. "A Los Angeles judge dismissed an Amazon tribe's defamation lawsuit against two media outlets that reported on the effects of remote community's sudden access to Starlink satellite internet," reports Courthouse News:
The New York Times reported that after nine months with Starlink, the Marubo saw teens glued to phones, social network addiction, violent video games, scams and minors watching pornography. Tribal leaders expressed concern about social behaviors changing rapidly.
Other outlets picked up the story, including TMZ, which ran the headline, "Tribe's Starlink hookup results in porn addiction!!!" despite The Times never making such a claim.
• Scottish prostitution plan unworkable: Scotland's Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) says a proposed prostitution bill criminalizing the purchase but not the sale of sex would be unworkable. The office also rejected claims "that sex workers would not need to be dragged to court to testify against people with whom they had had consensual sex, in order to secure convictions," Scotland's The National reports.
• Yep. The forced sale of TikTok is crony capitalist at the core, writes Reason's Matthew Petti.
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