The First Amendment (Amendment 1) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws respecting an establishment of religion; prohibiting the free exercise of religion; or abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.
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In a letter, dated, August 26, 2024, Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of the social media company Meta, confessed to the House Judiciary Committee that his teams were “pressured” by the Biden/Harris White House to censor content around the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that he will not repeat the actions he took in 2020 when he helped support “electoral infrastructure.” He explained that the original intent was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely.
Zuckerberg in the letter also said that the FBI warned his company about the potential Russian disinformation around Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma affecting the 2020 election. He said that his team temporarily demoted reporting from the New York Post alleging Biden family corruption while their fact-checkers could review the story. Zuckerberg said that since then, it has “been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Republicans accused Zuckerberg of attempting to influence the 2020 election, through his personal charity, by his spending $400 million dollars to try to “allegedly” facilitate safe voting.
Zuckerberg recently said, “we’re not going to bother to do that again this time.”
- Meta has a market cap of $1.32 trillion. It is the world’s largest online social network with close to 4 billion monthly active users of their family of apps.
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“When the Federal Government solicits the help of powerful high-tech media companies to suppress freedom of speech and expression, it is betraying the trust of the American people and violating the First Amendment of the Constitution.”
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The states of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden/Harris administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies. The lawsuit alleged that the Biden/Harris administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks “to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.”
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction imposing limits on White House officials, the FBI, the DOJ, the State Department, the Homeland Security Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the CDC, and many officials at those agencies. The agencies and officials were prohibited from communicating with “social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”
In addition, the injunction prohibited “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected speech.”
Government agencies and officials were further barred from urging, encouraging, or pressuring social media companies to “change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech.” In addition, government agencies may not coordinate with third-party groups, to pressure social media companies.
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Social media is controlled and operated by a few companies in the World.
Of the top twelve social networks in the World, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), controls four of them.
The most popular Social Networks as of April 2024 by number of monthly active users:
- Facebook – owned by Meta
- YouTube – owned by ***Alphabet/Google
- Instagram – owned by Meta
- WhatsApp – owned by Meta
- TikTok – controlled by the CCP
- WeChat – controlled by the CCP
- Facebook Messenger – owned by Meta
- Telegram – owned by Russia
- Snapchat – founded by Evan Spiegal and Bobby Murphy
- Douyin – controlled by the CCP
- Kuaishou – controlled by the CCP
- X/Twitter – owned by Elon Musk
***Alphabet/Google has a market cap of $2.011 trillion. It is a monopoly with more than 94% of the online search volume and market.
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Freedom of Speech is at great risk, for all peoples of the World, when government agencies secretly pressure, suppress, or force social media companies to remove or reduce content containing protected speech.
United States federal agencies and global corporations must never be allowed to violate the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
James Peifer
