Well, it was nice knowing you, Facebook! But I'm sure that with this new push from the Biden White House our stories won't be available on mainstream social media much longer.
In an interview today with Mika Brzezinski, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield made clear that it was the intention of the Biden Administration to coerce Facebook and other social media platforms into stopping the spread of "misinformation" AKA news that the White House doesn't like.
Watch:
The first half of the clip is your standard "we want to force social media to do what we want them to do." The same things we heard when Russians supposedly "hacked" the election in 2016 by posting a few memes.
Bedingfield says these social media outlets "should be held accountable" for not doing enough to stop the spread of what they deem as misinformation, specifically in regards to Covid.
As if anyone can log on to Facebook and scroll for five minutes without seeing at least 9 billion messages about Covid from the CDC pop up throughout their newsfeed. But no, Facebook isn't kicking off enough people for the White House. They aren't censorious enough.
Bedingfield takes it a step further in this same clip. Pay attention to what she says specifically about conservative news outlets.
The other thing the president has pointed out... is it is also the responsibility of people creating the content. And, again, I would say there are conservative news outlets who are creating irresponsible content that's sharing misinformation about the virus that's getting shared on these platforms.
Bedingfield, with this creepy smile on her face, begins talking about going beyond holding Facebook accountable and talks about the responsibility that private conservative news organizations have. Implying that after the government co-opts Facebook they're coming for conservative news next.
But wait a minute. Surely they can't go after us. We don't publish misinformation after all. Just the news.
Well, Ben Shapiro, who was slandered by taxpayer-funded NPR just yesterday as promoting misinformation, points out why this language from the White House is so disturbing.
You see? They don't have to prove something is misinformation. There's no legal standard. Anything that they don't like can AND WILL be labeled misinformation and they will work with their new friends at Facebook to make sure the non-party-line information is completely suppressed. In the NPR piece on Shapiro, they quote an "expert" saying, "any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation".
Yep. It's a very dangerous notion that the government would get to decide what's true and what's false and control the dissemination of information from their perch in DC.
Don't worry though. There should be tremendous pushback from the mainstream media. This is obviously an attack on the free press, right?! CNN and the New York Times will come out any minute and defend these right-wing outlets and decry the Biden administration for their unfounded and vicious attack on a free and fair press!
Any minute now...
