Over the last year, mainstream news reporters have dismissed every new revelation of government censorship. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) officials who primed social media executives to censor the Hunter Biden laptop were simply on guard for Russian disinformation, they said. White House officials who demanded that Facebook censor accurate information about Covid-19 vaccine side effects were simply trying to save lives, journalists argued. And the sweeping effort by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demand, alongside academic institutes, social media censorship of Covid and election information was, a “public-private partnership” to “counter misinformation,” many reporters insisted.
But many independent journalists disagree. We and others have documented how these efforts blatantly violate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which explicitly prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop in its possession since 2019 but primed social media executives in the summer of 2020 to view it instead as Russian disinformation, resulting in its censorship.