Democrats Threaten Democracy?
[Go to Not Going Back]
Democrats are waging a war against free speech. Where is this war happening? In the imaginations of Republicans.
This imaginary war has become the go-to response to accusations that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. JD Vance said “Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people.” The Washington Examiner ran an editorial “The Democratic Party is the real threat to democracy.” Lawyer and columnist Jonathan Turley wrote a book to elaborate on his claim that “A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech.” Many others are repeating similar claims.
A look at the evidence rapidly dismantles these claims.
- Did the Biden administration censor social media content about covid? It did not.
- Did the government suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story? Nope.
- Did US Envoy John F. Kerry want to censor climate opinions? That is not what he said.
- Was the Disinformation Governance Board a censorship agency? It was not.
- Are Harris and Walz on a crusade for censorship? I could not find such a crusade.
All these claims point to real political issues. There are legitimate debates over how social media companies should be regulated. One can question when government advice becomes government interference.
Every era sees cases where the limits of free speech are debated. For example, George W. Bush signed the Stolen Valor Act in 2005. This had the reasonable goal of forbidding people from lying about receiving military medals. However, in 2012 the Supreme Court found that it violated the First Amendment.
On the other hand, no administration has tried to stay in office after losing an election or incited a riot. Trump did both. These are gross violations of the fundamentals of our government. Trying to pin “enemy of democracy” on the Democrats is an example of Trump’s Im-Not-A-Puppet-YOURE-The-Puppet tactic. It is obscene to compare January 6 to accusations that the Biden administration asked Facebook to voluntarily censor some posts in one subject during a public health emergency.
Sections below debunk each of the claims listed above. These include
- Will a Second Trump Administration Defend Free Speech? Not if it carries out his threats.
1. Covid Censorship on Social Media?
Facebook, Twitter (now X), and other social media are private companies that are constitutionally permitted to have a wide range of policies on what can appear on their platform. One may debate what those policies should be, but the existence of a policy does not constitute government censorship. People were talking about “Facebook’s secret rules for removing posts” as early as 2018. Twitter was accused of having a bias towards Democrats and was then bought by a billionaire who uses it as a platform to support Republicans.
In 2024, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress saying “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content.” The letter did not say whether Zuckerberg also considered Republican criticism of social media companies’ policies or their demands for testimony to be pressure. The letter went on to say:
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our own decisions, including Covid-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.”
The Biden Administration was sued for exerting pressure on social media companies about covid health claims. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, notorious for extreme conservative decisions, found them to be guilty, saying they had created an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth”. Like many 5th Circuit decisions, this was overturned by a conservative Supreme Court. Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, writing for a 6-3 majority, concluded that the plaintiffs did not prove harm from Biden Administration pressure because (p. 12 of decision) Facebook’s policies on misinformation started before the Biden administration, the government was only one of several sources it consulted with, and Facebook refused government requests for suppressing content that did not violate company policy.
The behavior of the social media companies showed that, when push came to shove, the administration was making requests rather than giving orders.
2. Suppressing Hunter Biden Laptop Story?
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post ran a story saying that files on a computer misplaced by Hunter Biden showed that he had introduced a Ukrainian businessman to Joe Biden during the Obama administration. The story was picked by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post (October 14), CBS (October 16), the New York Times (October 19), CNN (October 21), and others. With the November 3 election just weeks away, there was great debate about the significance of the story, but it was certainly being covered.
One may argue with the way different news outfits portrayed the story, but that has nothing to do with government censorship.
Much has been made of how social media responded to the story. Twitter had links to the story deleted. According to testimony of Yoel Roth, the head of the “Trust and Safety” division of Twitter at the time, the laptop stories spreading on Twitter “bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack and leak operation. Twitter had to decide what to do.” He said, “My recommendation was that we prevent the articles from being actively recommended or amplified by Twitter’s algorithms, rather than blocking them altogether,” but Twitter’s official policy on hacked documents only left them with the option of banning or not.
Length of time the article was banned before Twitter reversed the decision: 24 hours.
Facebook did not ban the article but in 2022, Zuckerberg admitted that, for a week, it restricted how much the algorithm spread it. He said that the FBI did not ask them not to run the story and did not even mention the story. As Zuckerberg puts it, “the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.”
Remember: the election occurred during the Trump Administration. But anything anyone does anywhere in government can be a Democratic plot. That’s what I keep hearing from Trump fans, anyway.
OK, never mind that. It wasn’t the actual government, it was former officials from the government, and it was not actual censorship, it was a letter from former National Intelligence and CIA heads stating that the “arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter… has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”
If former officials opining on national security is a threat to democracy, the United States has been threatened for decades.
3. Climate Censorship from John Kerry?
John Kerry is the Biden administration Climate Envoy (full disclosure: I handed out flyers for his Senate campaign years ago). He is held up as an example of Democratic censorship because of the following quote:
“…there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence. So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
If you only quote the second sentence, you can claim that he is suggesting repealing the First Amendment, an idea that would be unthinkable for a liberal like Kerry. The full quote makes it clearer that he is trying to say that, since the First Amendment protects the right to spread disinformation, climate activists can not shut down the disinformation but must elect politicians who support good policies.
4. Disinformation Governance Board?
Ironically, the Disinformation Board was killed because of disinformation. The Board’s job was to keep track of unambiguous disinformation and help the government react to it. It was not created to stop people from saying or writing anything. A similar agency with a different name was created during the Trump administration. Here is the Homeland Security chief saying what he thinks the board was supposed to do:
“I’ll give you a real-life example, the [human trafficking] cartels spread disinformation that [border security] Title 42 does not apply to the Haitians. And that prompts, potentially, Haitians to try to come to the United States. And what do we do? U.S. Customs and Border Protection, phenomenal enforcement agency, goes on Creole language stations and communicates that Title 42 does apply to Haitians.”
The fact that Jonathan Turley mentions this as an example of a censorship agenda makes me think he’s not a reliable source. He also mischaracterizes the Walz quote below.
5. Harris and Walz Anti-Free Speech Crusade?
A Walz statement that is somewhat disturbing is “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
This was not a free-floating attack on free speech. Walz was responding to an MSNBC journalist saying, “I want to talk about what you just mentioned about misinformation — because … disinformation — telling people where to vote the wrong way — … it’s becoming more ominous. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you do to ensure that there are penalties for that?” Immediately after his sentence about democracy, Walz said, “Tell the truth where the voting places are, who can vote, who’s able to be there.” This is more about countering voter suppression than monitoring political speech.
Still, it is troubling to me that Walz puts it that way, so I wondered if he has been attacking free speech as governor of Minnesota. An internet search on “Minnesota censorship,” specifying 2020 to June 2024, found these titles: New Voices law further protects student journalists from censorship, and Minnesota Just Passed a Law Making It Illegal for Libraries to Ban LGBTQ+ Books. In other words, he was signing protections against censorship.
Harris’ statements have also been distorted. In a 2019 debate, she argued with Elizabeth Warren over whether Twitter should remove Donald Trump. Harris had just written to Twitter to say that President Trump “appears to violate the terms of the user agreement” by attacking the Ukraine whistleblower. Her letter pointed out that “Others have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior.” Again, this is not government censorship, this is a single Senator trying to rally public opinion to push Twitter to enforce its own rules. Twitter declined to take her suggestion, though they later deplatformed Trump because of January 6.
6. Would a Second Trump Administration Defend Free Speech?
Some people show great concern over CDC doctors putting pressure on Facebook. They allege that there is the possibility of retaliation if organizations do not bend to the pressure. How do they feel about explicit public threats of retaliation from President Trump?
Television news organizations whose licenses Trump has threatened to revoke because he does not like their coverage:
- ABC
- CBS
- NBC
- CNN
- MSNBC
Trump is confused about how station licensing works, but presumably he could find someone who knows how to harm unfriendly media. Trump was unable to follow through on most of his threats in his first term, but he would likely be much less restrained in a second term. For example, he also wants to undermine the independence of the Federal Communications Commission, which would remove another obstacle to pursuing vendettas.
Trump’s White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said “I absolutely think he will follow up on those threats” to retaliate against TV networks.
He sued the New York Times for a 2018 story about his family, but lost in court and was ordered to pay $400,000 in legal fees for the defendant. When he sued CNN for $475 million for defamation, a federal judge that he himself had appointed dismissed the lawsuit because it targeted statements of opinion. He threatened to prosecute Google for “showing only ‘bad stories’ about him.” Some allege that negative stories about him from the Washington Post have prompted him to intervene in procurement and policy decisions specifically to hurt Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post. Just yesterday, Bezos caused an uproar by cancelling the Post’s endorsement of Harris for president, which some see as a capitulation to Trump.
I could not find any defamation lawsuits against news organizations by Biden, the Clintons, or Obama.
Three of the conservative Supreme Court justices, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito, would like to weaken First Amendment protections. Conceivably, Trump could fill two more retirements in a second term to cement a majority that might give him more room to punish news outlets for unfavorable coverage.