What do you call it when a media organizations censors a story about Big Tech leader Mark Zuckerberg confessing he caved to Democrat pressure to censor so-called "misinformation"?
On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a surprise letter to House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), publicly regretting caving into pressure from the Biden Administration to censor so-called misinformation about COVID-19 and election issues, including “humor and satire,” from Facebook. Zuckerberg also regretted the Hunter Biden laptop censorship fiasco.
The New York Times -- the "All The News That's Fit to Print" people -- has blatantly ignored this story. On Thursday, a Times movie critic talked about Zuckerberg and the 2010 movie The Social Network, but nothing on Zuckerberg's letter in real life.
Zuckerberg wrote in a letter dated Monday, August 26:
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it.
The Washington Post covered it. The Los Angeles Times appears to have run an Associated Press story in its print edition. After being the hold-out among the three major networks, CBS News finally ran a full story on its 24-hour streaming service -- but it's still a goose egg on broadcast TV.
The Times blackout is fascinating, given that for years the newspaper has been obsessed with the subject of government censorship, but from the other side, being very eager to patrol even private online groups for so-called “misinformation,” with tech reporters Taylor Lorenz and Kevin Roose particularly eager to serve as lead hall monitors.
Roose is a long-time foe of conservative speech online and seems to lack both a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. He even finds the Christian satire site Babylon Bee “misinformation.” Taylor Lorenz when she was at the paper longed to play hall monitor, lamenting in February 2021 that one couldn’t listen in on private conversations taking place within online apps like Clubhouse [remember that one?], Signal, and Telegram.
(Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov was recently arrested in France under so-far opaque charges of allegedly allowing illegal activity to take place on his messaging platform.)
In February 2022, New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger called for the massively popular podcaster Joe Rogan to be censored by his hosting platform Spotify in “Spotify Chooses Profits Over Truth.” Bensinger achieved an impressive amount of self-righteous indignation over a Times competitor.
In the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in April 2022, New York Times political reporter Jeremy Peters mocked conservatives for suggesting Twitter was biased against conservative ideas and posts in “Vowing to Quit Twitter Is Popular. Actually Leaving Is Hard.”
In June 2023, Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel made the front page with "G.O.P. Strikes At Researchers Into Deception -- A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.” Yet another Times attempt to dismiss concerns about the government squelching of free speech in the name of protecting citizens from “misinformation” and “disinformation” regarding COVID.
Steven Lee Myers -- a journalist, after all -- saw free speech as a threat to whatever a Democratic administration declarer "disinformation." His pro-censorship take in a front-page February 2023 article, “Free Speech vs. Disinformation Comes to a Head,” certainly doesn’t hold up well when paired with Zuckerberg’s new letter:
Yet the growing trail of internal communications suggests a more convoluted and tortured struggle between government officials frustrated by the spread of dangerous falsehoods and company officials who resented and often resisted government entreaties….
He confidently quoted an NYU professor who assured Myers there was “no systematic evidence any place of a broad methodical plot” between the government and the platforms to censor.
On the contrary, social media platforms often appear reluctant to block political content, especially from Republicans, even when it appears to violate their own policies of abusiveness.
“It’s not that they’re going after conservatives,” Mr. Barrett said. “They’re fearing conservative backlash.”
“Conservative backlash” wholly justified and validated by Zuckerberg’s mea culpa. Followed by total silence from one of the biggest pushers of social media censorship, the New York Times.
