New to PJ Media:
For years, leftists have dismissed free speech concerns about Big Tech’s censorship of voices that dissent from the left’s agenda. Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest are private companies, as you can see, and they can set whatever speech policies they want. Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, that argument has been consigned to the dustbin of history, as it could suggest that Musk is free to restore free speech on his platform. But evidence is mounting that the FBI was active in getting pre-Musk Twitter to censor patriots, and it may be that the bureau actually violated the First Amendment by pushing Twitter to the six deep voices it didn’t like. Now the question is: who can investigate the FBI? Will the FBI investigate itself?
This is not, after all, by any means the first questionable activity by the previously excellent and blameless feds. It’s a steep descent from putting Al Capone behind bars and taking down the mob to participating in the entrapment of a sitting president and investigating angry parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” but that’s the Merrick Garland’s ugly FBI legacy. In light of that, it’s no surprise that, as Fox News reported Wednesday, “the FBI may have violated the First Amendment by asking Twitter to moderate certain speech, as revealed in a recent ‘Twitter Files’ statement, experts say.” constitutional. Fox Digital News”.
Fox notes that “a Twitter Files installment posted by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi last week revealed that former Twitter security chief Yoel Roth was apparently attending weekly meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence on how to moderate misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.” That’s the same Department of Homeland Security that established a Disinformation Governance Board to further restrict speech until it was forced to retire and deeply criticize the Board over First Amendment concerns.
It must be remembered that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution in the first place to prevent any individual or group from gaining precisely the kind of control over public discourse that the Biden administration is repeatedly trying to achieve. If a group can control the parameters of public discourse or place itself beyond criticism or scrutiny, it has a free hand to establish tyranny, and no one can issue even the slightest murmur of protest. The administration’s entire bogus altruistic concern about “misinformation” and “disinformation” is based entirely and solely on its decision to try to sell the ban on dissenting voices to the American people under the banner of protecting them from such scourges.
There is more. Read the rest here.