‘Silicon Curtain’ Is Protecting Government Censorship

Citing Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” metaphor describing the Cold War division of Europe, health care policy expert Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told an audience, “We are now in the middle of a Silicon Curtain of censorship descending across the previously free West.”

In a keynote address at The Heartland Institute’s Benefit Dinner in Chicago on September 13, Bhattacharya said public health is the new “fig leaf” for justifying government censorship.

“Free speech is in dire danger in the U.S.,” said Bhattacharya. “The government will use its power to suppress criticism [of] its own misinformation.”

Bhattacharya is a plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri, in which the Supreme Court lifted a preliminary injunction directing the Biden administration not to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to suppress protected speech” and remanded the case to a lower court.

“This gives a way to the government to censor at will,” said Bhattacharya. “All they have to do is send emails and algorithms to social media companies without naming a single person—just name ideas not allowed to be said online.

“The First Amendment, in effect, is an unenforceable dead letter,” said Bhattacharya.

Under Fire for Opinions

Bhattacharya, a medical doctor and professor of medicine, economics, and health care research policy at Stanford University, rose to prominence when he published The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) on October 4, 2020, with epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration criticized COVID lockdowns and urged authorities to focus on keeping children in school and protecting the elderly instead of imposing broad-based restrictions.

Although the writers were highly recognized for their work and associated with Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford Universities, respectively, powerful government figures denounced them. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the trio “fringe epidemiologists” in emails that were made public later.

Ostracized and Blacklisted

Bhattacharya was ostracized by other professors at Stanford and was blacklisted on Twitter. When Elon Musk purchased the social media giant, he discovered the list and shared it with Bhattacharya.

Google “de-boosted” the GBD, which was posted online and signed by more than 940,000 doctors, researchers, and concerned citizens. Facebook banned posting of it altogether.

Using internal government emails they obtained, the plaintiffs showed the government was controlling social media companies by threatening to regulate them out of business if they didn’t abide by the Biden administration’s censorship demands.

The White House also used universities to help with the censorship work, which the government is prohibited from doing directly. Bhattacharya brought up the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which received government grants to develop algorithms to target a particular idea. The government shared that information with social media platforms.

Rising Worldwide

Europe, Canada, the U.K., and Australia have led the way on legislation to control speech, Bhattacharya told the audience. The bills and laws ostensibly outlaw violence, pornography, and hate on the internet, carry Orwellian names, and establish authorities to do the enforcement.

These include the Digital Services Act in the E.U., the Online Harms Act in Canada, and the Online Safety Act of 2023 in the U.K. A bill in France establishes a digital “safety” commission for the same purpose.

“It is dangerous to let governments have control over the definition of hate,” said Bhattacharya. “It’s even more dangerous to allow government to determine what is misinformation because science and medicine depend on free speech to operate properly.”

Censoring Political Opponents

Scott Jensen, a medical doctor and Minnesota state senator who ran against Tim Walz for governor in 2022, says his respect for Bhattacharya is immense. Jensen was a prominent critic of COVID-19 policies, and Facebook censored his election page. Jensen lost the race, and Walz went on to implement some of the most draconian COVID-19 restrictions and is Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in this year’s election for president.

“Dr. Bhattacharya’s willingness to present and stand by a contrarian narrative—which ultimately proved to be profoundly wise—will go down in history as an act of immense courage in the face of smothering government censorship fueled by behemoth, profit-driven technological companies,” said Jensen.

“American’s First Amendment rights are under attack by a political elite, but Dr. Jay Bhattacharya continues to stand in the breach and do whatever is necessary to protect and defend free speech,” said Jensen.

AnneMarie Schieber ([email protected]) is the managing editor of Health Care News.

Related Topics:#AnneMarieSchieber #DrJayBhattacharya #GovernmentCensorship #HeartlandDailyNews SiliconCurtain

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Mark Zuckerberg Tells Joe Rogan That Biden Admin Would ‘Scream’ And ‘Curse’ At Meta Employees To Censor ‘True’ Content

Published on January 18, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Cohen

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan on Friday that officials in President Joe Biden’s administration would yell and hurl profanities at his company’s employees over content censorship.

The Biden administration pushed Facebook to censor posts about COVID-19 that it deemed misinformation, according to documents published by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan in July 2023. Zuckerberg, on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” revealed that also Meta faced investigations and backlash after Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” in July 2021 for not censoring so-called COVID-19 misinformation.

WATCH:

“Basically, these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s like these documents are — it’s all kind of out there.”

Rogan asked if Meta had recorded any of the calls, but Zuckerberg said he did not believe so.

“I mean, there are emails. The emails are published. It’s all kind of out there …. And basically, it just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not going to — we’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous,’” Zuckerberh said. “They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how ten years from now or something, you’re going to see an ad that says, ‘Okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible, like for this kind of payment,’ like this sort of like class-action lawsuit-type meme. And they’re like, ‘No, you have to take that down.’”

“We just said, ‘No, we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are true.’ And then at some point, I guess — I don’t know — it flipped a bit,” he added. “I mean, Biden, when he was — he gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference or to some journalist, where he basically was like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know. Then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”

Facebook executives believed they were engaged in a “knife fight” with Biden’s White House on COVID-19 censorship, according to a House Judiciary Committee report published in May.

Zuckerberg in August expressed remorse that Facebook caved to pressure from the Biden administration to censor content in a letter to Jordan. He wrote that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook teams to censor COVID-19 content that the platform otherwise would not have suppressed, and voiced frustration when Facebook disagreed.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg also alleged in 2022 on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that the FBI warned Facebook of a “Russian propaganda” dump just before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke.

“The FBI basically came to us and some folks on our team and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert, we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election and we have noticed that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so be vigilant,’” he said.

The Meta CEO said he could not recall whether the FBI specifically mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop story, but asserted it fit “the pattern.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Meta referred the DCNF to documents released by the House Judiciary Committee and Jordan.

Business

Google Rejects Eurocrats’ Push For More Censorship

Published on January 16, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Ireland Owens

Google soundly rejected the European Union’s push for the platform to censor content Thursday, declaring that it would not implement so-called “fact-checks.”

The tech giant told the EU that it would not incorporate fact checks into its search results and YouTube videos, Axios first reported. Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker wrote a letter to Renate Nikolay, deputy director-general for Communications Networks, Content and Technology at the European Commission, stating the fact-checking required by the law “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services.”

The European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which was introduced in 2022, would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside its search results and YouTube videos and would also require it to incorporate fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms, Axios reported.

Axios’ report comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Jan. 7 that his company was ending its third-party fact-checking program in favor of implementing community notes. Meta’s announcement states that Meta’s platforms are “built to be places where people can express themselves freely.” Zuckerberg said that his company’s approach to content moderation often resulted in “censorship,” NPR reported.

Zuckerberg recently criticized the European Union’s data laws as “censoring” social media. The EU has rejected his claims as “misleading.”

Some people have criticized some major tech companies, claiming that they have censored conservative speech. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced in October the launch of an investigation into Google for allegedly censoring conservatives.

Zuckerberg criticized Biden officials for pushing Meta to remove content that the Biden-Harris administration alleged to be disinformation during a recent appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to combat social media censorship.

In December, Trump announced that he was nominating Andrew Ferguson to lead the Federal Trade Commission, stating that Ferguson “has a proven record of standing up to Big Tech censorship, and protecting Freedom of Speech in our Great Country.”

Minnesota Republican Rep. Tom Emmer said in a post on X that Google’s decision was a “step in the right direction,” adding “Kudos to @Google.”

A source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that the content of Google’s letter as reported by Axios was accurate.