Comment by cactusplant7374
5 months ago
> From President Biden on down, administration officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” Alphabet said, claiming it “has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
This actually surprised me because I thought (and maybe still think) that it was Google employees that led the charge on this one.
It's in their interests now to throw Biden under the bus. There may be truth to this, but I'm sure its exaggerated for effect.
Worth noting that Trump directly threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for life in relation to this: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/31/politics/video/smr-trump-zuck...
I wouldn't trust any public statement from these companies once that kind of threat has been thrown around. People don't exactly want to go to prison forever.
It was. At the time, they felt like they were doing the right thing -- the heroic thing, even -- in keeping dangerous disinformation away from the public view. They weren't shy about their position that censorship in that case was good and necessary. Not the ones who said it on TV, and not the ones who said it to me across the dinner table.
For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.
To be fair, even if they were being honest about Biden twisting their arm (I don't buy it), the timing makes it impossible to believe their claim.
Why wouldn't you buy it?
The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...
Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...
It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.
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They don't need a paper trail. Conservatives will believe anything damning they see about liberals. Just vague accusations or outright lies work plenty well to keep conservatives foaming at the mouth over imagined issues.
It's been known for years that the White House was pressuring Google on this. One court ordered them to cease temporarily. I wanted to link the article, but it's hard to find because of the breaking news.