In case you missed it …
A new study by NYU shows that Russian Twitter trolls had no discernible effect on the 2016 election.
USC’s School of Social Work will no longer use the word “field” (as in “field work”), thanks to its anti-racist policies.
Meta says it will remove content promoting or endorsing the riots in Brazil.
Dear Friends —
The (Democrat) political establishment wasn’t just ordering Twitter around.
As we always really knew, they also hold serious sway within Google, YouTube and Facebook. Now, we have more details about how the White House demanded that Facebook censor Tucker Carlson for talking about problems with Covid vaccines, and how Facebook complied.
(Yes, this is the same Facebook I wrote about yesterday whose boss spent over $400 million to help elect Democrats nationwide. They’re all playing for the same team.)
The story
Emails released by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri show that White House officials called the company to complain about Carlson’s segment.
Here’s the released email where the White House complains that the censorship, cleverly called “reduction” wasn’t enough. From Rob Flaherty, the WH Director of Digital Strategy:
Facebook initially pushed back against censoring the video, admitting it didn’t violate their policies, but capitulated as White House officials warned that refusal could be a problem. Flaherty said in an email, “Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.”
Facebook later assured the White House that the video would “continue to be demoted even though it was not ultimately fact checked.”
What Tucker said
Here’s Tucker’s take on it:
“It was never really a secret there were huge problems with the COVID shots. We knew this because the Biden administration’s own VAERS database indicated that from the beginning. A lot of people were being injured, but the media suppressed that news. We tried to point it out more than a year ago, not because we have a problem with vaccines or are anti-vaxxers, but because if you force people to take something you probably ought to know what it is and what effects it might have. That’s the most basic right of all, to know what goes into your body, to know something about it. But in trying to say that, we were censored and now we know we were censored by the White House.”
After detailing the highlights of the emails, Carlson interviewed Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry who said, “It’s certainly a violation of First Amendment rights.” He said that although Tucker characterized the email as pressuring Facebook to censor, “I would say they demanded.”
You can watch Tucker’s interview here.
Like a virus
This comes on the heels of the Twitter capitulating to a Pfizer board member who, you guessed it, didn’t like some tweets criticizing the virus.
Pfizer employed former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb who complained to Twitter about a post that claimed natural immunity was better than vaccine immunity.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive. Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
Twitter’s Strategic Response team ruled that the tweet didn’t violate misinformation rules, but it got a “misleading” label nonetheless, and replies, shares, and likes were disabled.
The closer we look, the worse it looks.
— Ken
If they can do it to Tucker, they can anyone
& did sample some when friends on Facebook were censored when Trump first ran
& then I got canned on LinkedIn.
END this BS