Biden Administration Pisses On First Amendment, Demands Information About Scope of "Misinformation" Across Big Tech
The information operations fight of our lives
In today’s True Covid newsletter:
Biden’s Surgeon General Demands Information From Big Tech.
Dem Senators Introduce New Anti-First Amendment Bill.
This is Information Warfare.
The Spotlight - A list of news stories that you may have missed.
1. Biden’s Surgeon General Demands Information From Big Tech
As reported by the New York Times, President Biden’s Surgeon General has demanded social media produce information about the scale of “COVID-19 misinformation” across their platforms, spanning search engines, social media feeds, instant messaging, and e-commerce systems. In other words, a high-ranking government official is demanding private companies arbitrate truth, and report all instances of dissent across the internet.
The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.
Before I get to how dangerous this is from a First Amendment standpoint, let’s look at a few examples of what Big Tech has deemed to be “misinformation” throughout the pandemic.
White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation’
Twitter to Penalize Users Who Claim Vaccinated People Can Spread Covid-19
Twitter Suspends Science Writer After He Posts Results Of Pfizer Clinical Test
Alex Berenson Permanently Banned from Twitter for Challenging COVID Vaccine Orthodoxy
I could go on and on, but you get the point. Even scientific facts are banned from these platforms under the guise of “misinformation.” Joe Rogan said it well:
“The problem I have with the term misinformation, especially today is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact, like for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘if you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID,’ you'd be removed from social media. They would, they would ban you from certain platforms. Now that's accepted as fact,” Rogan responded to critics.
If you said, ‘I don't think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now that's openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said, ‘I think it's possible that COVID-19 came from a lab,’ you'd be banned from many social media platforms. Now that's on the cover of Newsweek,” he elaborated.
It’s a moving target, with moving goalposts and moving mouths constantly changing the information environment. Even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention walked back the efficacy of cloth masks, we still have U.S. senators pushing the lies of masks. On a recent Woke AF podcast, Lord Fauci spread blatant Covid misinformation. It’s not just that they get to determine what qualifies as misinformation, but when to enforce it. Here’s Lord Fauci’s recent example:
“That’s an excellent question that so many parents are asking with children in that age group. And the answer to that is to do what you can to surround your children with people who are vaccinated and boosted. And when you’re in a vulnerable situation, to wear a mask. We’re trying now to get to a point where we don’t need to have masks on children. But we want to make sure the schools are safe,” Fauci said.
He’s openly calling for your children to be segregated based on vaccination status even though it’s a scientific fact that vaccines do not stop transmission. Not just that, you don’t need a degree in statistics to understand that children are at near-zero risk from Covid. None of this matters to the bureaucrat supremacists. What they say goes, even if it contradicts prior statements from other bureaucrats, or in Fauci’s case, his own words.
2. Dem Senators Introduce New Anti-First Amendment Bill
This week, two U.S. senators introduced a bill that would legalize censorship. U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), together introduced the anti-first amendment bill.
Like a good little authoritarian, Sen. Murphy explained the need for government to tightly control the information environment:
“Throughout this pandemic, the impact of misinformation has been devastating. Rumors and conspiracy theories about the efficacy of masking or the safety of vaccines still run rampant on social media and have caused thousands of deaths that could have been prevented. This legislation will help us get smart about how to tackle misinformation and effectively promote science-based health information, especially as we continue fighting COVID-19 and prepare for future public health emergencies.”
For all of the supposed hatred of Putin, they sure sound a lot like the guy. Effective immediately, Russia will punish “fake news” with a penalty of up to 15-years in prison.
Like Putin, their end goal is to create a cyber curtain, defending the narrative while hiding behind the levers of power like cowards. Flames will shoot out in the form of Congressional bills and Big Tech crackdowns. Smoke will fill the room in the form of vague terms of service changes enforced by the cyber-Stasi and uneven application depending on the political narratives of the day.
If you don’t think this is coming to the U.S., you vastly underestimate Democrats and our federal government bureaucrats. That’s the entire purpose of censorship. They start with Alex Jones, move on to President Trump, then to all the rest, and eventually, they realize they have to use stiffer forms of punishment when alternative tech proves otherwise unstoppable. They will not be content just to boot us from existing platforms. Their thirst for control will not end once you sign up for Truth Social or any of the other alternative options that pop up.
It's not just that they can censor or ban you from social media, freeze your bank account or banish you from society. They've already attempted these things and were successful to an extent - look at all those people who got fired over the jab mandate only to watch Democrats walk back Covidstan a few months later on the eve of the State of the Union Address! They have bad intentions; no person with an ounce of respect for freedom would ever attempt to silence or fire half of the country.
Government officials have no business dictating what information is allowed to circulate on the internet. Legally, they literally have no business making these demands. Our constitution explicitly states this. For those who need a refresher, here’s what the U.S. Constitution has to say about free speech:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
It could not be more clear. This isn’t a Bible interpretation situation. The text is unmistakably discernable. Politicians are not legally allowed to create laws that prohibit or reduce free speech. Yet here we are. Not only is Congress aiming to reduce free speech, but so is Biden’s Surgeon General. To make matters worse, Big Tech is already in full-blown censorship mode, but it’s not enough.
They view us as pests. By “us,” I mean anyone they categorize as dissenters, including everyday people like you and me, but even respected scientific names and voices like Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. John Ioannidis, and Dr. Robert Malone, and hundreds of others. Also included in this broad bucket are scientific journals, organizations, and countries that stray from the official narrative at any given time. Pests must be exterminated, and nobody likes a half-assed pest control job. They need all of us gone (banned), our reach reduced (shadowbanned), and our information discredited (“misinformation”).
3. This is Information Warfare
Not only are they trying to affirmatively promote their information, but they are also seeking to suppress dissension. This is a classic information operations move.
During my time on active duty in the Army, I worked in the field of information operations. While a little outdated, here’s a brief explanation of information operations from an old Army field manual:
Information is an element of combat power. Commanders conduct informa- tion operations (IO) to apply it. Focused IO—synchronized with effective in- formation management and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance— enable commanders to gain and maintain information superiority. IO is a prime means for achieving information superiority.
Information operations is the employment of the core capabili- ties of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychologi- cal operations, military deception, and operations security, in con- cert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to affect or defend information and information systems, and to influence deci- sionmaking.
In short, the goal is to gain complete control over the information environment for the purpose of achieving information superiority in the same way an air force attempts to achieve air superiority over a combat zone. This is achieved through a wide range of means, though I won’t bore you by going into the weeds. Maybe in another newsletter.
I bring up information operations because this is exactly what is taking place on Big Tech each day. Like our military, these companies have soldiers and artificial intelligence affecting the information domain in real-time, 24/7. They defend information while flooding the digital environment with information aligning their preferred narratives. An example of this is Twitter’s trending section. It’s unbelievably biased, but it’s only one part of the information warfare they participate in daily. The real fight occurs through shadowbanning, censorship, suspensions, and outright banning. Whether through carefully tailored algorithms or mini-authoritarian arbiters of truth, the end result is the same. Information dominance. This is information operations. The Biden administration wants to make this permanent, cementing it in place through legislation and directives from the government.
We are the last and only line of defense. Nobody else is going to stand up to this. You’re either a Canadian trucker or Biden’s Surgeon General. There is no room for a comfortable, less confrontational middle ground. I wish we lived in those times, but the sand in the hourglass is draining fast. When it expires, your voice will be lost forever. You can scream as loud as you want, but when you’re in a soundproofed room, it won’t matter.
A list of news stories that you may have missed:
Judicial Watch: China Was Withholding COVID Data As Early As January 2020 -- And Fauci Knew It
Maybe the most ridiculous article about the Ukraine invasion
Coroner determines man’s death caused by COVID-19 jab complication
About the author:
Derek Christensen is an Army combat veteran, writer, and former CIA analyst. He’s written for US Army and DoD publications. Derek has served as a communications director at the Pentagon, where he helped produce content for mucky government officials. He's been nominated for approximately zero writing awards, but he's significantly better at getting to the bottom of stuff than Lindsey Graham.