Video is From The Hill, Which Is, As Far As I Can Tell, An All Transgender News Show (Take It For What It Is) The Article Below Is More Comprehensive
FaceBook's whole business model is "data-mining" their customers and then selling that data to advertisers.
Europe has been attempting to ban the process.
FaceBook has long supported leftwing Democrats, both with direct donations and $350 million+ investments in ballot harvesting and GOTV efforts in Democrat districts. And they were now calling on the Democrats they lease-with-an-option-to-buy to defend them against Europe's attempts to bring the FaceBook data-mining operations to heel.
When Joe Biden demanded that FaceBook censor people talking about their covid vax injuries, FaceBook objected, pointing out that attempting to censor such stories would just bring more attention to them. (They don't seem to have objected on principle, just that the censorship would not be a productive way to achieve Regime goals.)
However, they censored this material anyway. Internal emails show that FaceBook said they had more important matters at stake, specifically "data flows."
What did they mean by that? They meant they had to appease the Biden Administration so that the Biden Administration would protect their data-mining operations around the world. These are the "data flows" they meant -- the data flowing from FaceBook users to FaceBook and then to advertisers.
The Biden White House did not violate the First Amendment when it requested that Facebook censor information on Covid's origin and vaccine side effects, say many policymakers, journalists, and legal experts. Rather, White House officials were simply expressing their free speech rights, and Facebook executives were free to ignore White House requests.
But newly released internal emails show that Facebook executives felt pressure to comply with White House demands in order to resolve a European Union ban on the social media company's ability to transfer the data of European users to its servers in the United States.
In July 2021, after a White House official demanded that Facebook censor more information, Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, Nick Clegg, asked his colleagues to comply. The reason? Because of "the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration -- data flows etc..."
By "data flows," Clegg was referring to the EU's demand that Facebook stop transferring European user data -- which Facebook advertisers value for targeting customers -- to the United States.
The dispute was no small matter. In May of this year, EU regulators fined Meta, Facebook's parent company, a record $1.3 billion for breaking the EU's privacy regulations. The regulator said that Meta had violated a 2020 ruling by the EU's highest court.
Two months later, on July 10, 2023, the Biden Administration and European Union announced a deal, the "EU-US Data Privacy Framework."
The series of events suggests a quid pro quo. Facebook would bow to White House requests for censorship in exchange for its help with the European Union.
"This is a gross violation of the First Amendment," Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger told Public, "not only because it involves what the Supreme Court considers 'coercion,' but also because it's equally unconstitutional for the government to seek censorship through contract or conspiracy. And that's what happened here."
The White House wasn't the only entity demanding that Facebook censor. NGOs and journalists from NBC and the New York Times were also pressuring Facebook to censor more. In response, Facebook executives weighed the radical "blackholing" measure, which blocks links to external web sites without informing users.
But it's clear from the newly released emails that Facebook executives felt the greatest pressure from the White House and that they feared the White House would hurt them in other ways.
Until now, critics of government demands for greater Facebook censorship have focused on the White House's threat to revoke Facebook's Section 230 status, which immunizes the company from many forms of liability.
But the new emails point to a form of government leverage over the platform that has been ignored until now: the EU demand on Facebook to stop data flows from the EU to the US, and the conditional willingness of the White House to push back against it.
This is the final proof needed to establish that FaceBook was acting as an agent of the United States in censoring the Regime's enemies. There wasn't merely the threat of stripping their s.230 protection. (Or the threat, which I always mention, that the government will stop protecting these illegal monopolies and tart prosecuting them.)
There was also a direct bribe, a straight payoff: Censor for us and we'll fight for your right to mine the personal information of your users for advertising use.
FaceBook straight-up makes that connection themselves: "we have bigger fish to fry with the [Biden] Administration... data flows..."
They admit in their internal emails that they didn't want to buck the Biden Administration on censorship because they needed their help in protecting their core business of selling user information.
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