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HARRIS: Called for Trump’s Twitter Account to Be Terminated
In an October 1, 2019 letter addressed to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Senator Harris asked the social media company to consider suspending President Trump’s account because he had: (a) used Twitter to “target, harass, and attempt to out” the whistleblower who filed a complaint alleging that Trump had once pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to uncover damaging information about Joe Biden; (b) likened the whistleblower to a spy and “further implied that the punishment for that should be death”; and (c) tweeted that “a Civil War” might erupt if Democrats were to impeach him. “I believe the President’s recent tweets rise to the level that Twitter should consider suspending his account,” Harris wrote in her letter. “Others have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior. And when this kind of abuse is being spewed from the most powerful office in the United States, the stakes are too high to do nothing.”
In an October 15, 2019 CNN interview, host Jake Tapper asked Senator Harris about her call “for Twitter to suspend the account of President Trump.” Harris replied: “You can look at the manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to know that what Donald Trump says on Twitter impacts people’s perceptions about what they should and should not do…. He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.”
HARRIS: Promoting Government Collusion with Social Media Companies
During a December 19, 2022 appearance on NPR, VP Harris stated that in order to minimize the spread of misinformation and disinformation: “I fully expect and would require that leaders in [the social media] sector cooperate and work with us who are concerned about national security and concerned about upholding and protecting our democracy to do everything in their power to ensure that there is not a manipulation that is allowed or overlooked that is done with the intention of upending the security of our democracy and our nation.”
HARRIS & BIDEN: Exhorting the Press & Social Media to Censor “Misinformation & Disinformation”
On January 13, 2022, President Biden pleaded with Americans to continue to battle the coronavirus pandemic by wearing masks and getting vaccinated, and he exhorted media companies to censor posts that contradicted government narratives on COVID-19, its transmission, and the efficacy of masks and vaccines. “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets,” he said, “please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows, it has to stop.”
HARRIS & BIDEN: “Disinformation Governance Board” to Thwart Free Speech
On April 27, 2022, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that a “Disinformation Governance Board” (DGB), whose stated purpose was to protect America’s national security by combating foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns, had recently been established as part of DHS. The DGB was headed by Nina Jankowicz, who described herself “a disinformation fellow” and an expert on Russian disinformation.
In an opinion piece published by The Hill on May 1, 2022, media-and-politics columnist Joe Concha criticized the DGB by pointing out that politics are routinely used to determine what is classified as “disinformation” or “misinformation.” He noted, for instance, that:
“You get the point,” wrote Concha. “Mayorkas and Jankowicz are two of the last people who should be leading any ‘Ministry of Truth.’ And the U.S. government shouldn’t even have considered creating something like this [DGB] to be run by partisans with political agendas.”
HARRIS & BIDEN: Pressured Facebook to Censor Content
In an August 26, 2024 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg affirmed that “senior officials” from the Biden-Harris administration had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months [in 2021] to censor certain COVID-19 content” that people sought to post on the social media platform. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg added. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
In that same letter, Zuckerberg wrote that just before the 2020 presidential election between Biden-Harris and Trump-Pence, Facebook had temporarily demoted all references to the New York Post story reporting that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained damning evidence of corruption involving Joe Biden and his family. The demotion of that story, Zuckerberg explained, occurred because the FBI had warned Facebook that the laptop’s content may have been part of a “Russian disinformation operation” designed to thwart Joe Biden’s presidential chances. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter, “and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
WALZ: Free Speech Restrictions
In a 2022 interview on MSNBC, Gov. Walz — referring to what he called the spread of “insidious” “misinformation” that could potentially threaten America’s government and way-of-life — stated that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, especially around our democracy.”
