Hey Zuck, Remember When You Said You’d Never Again Cave To Government Pressure? About That…

Free Speech

from the hypocrites-all-the-way-down dept

You may recall a year or so ago, when Mark Zuckerberg whined to Jim Jordan about how the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain… content.” Or maybe you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and whined some more about Biden pressure on moderation, even though he admitted there that he rejected their requests:

And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true. Right, I mean they they basically pushed us and and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.

And I was just like, well we’re not going to do that. Like, we’re clearly not going to do that.

Zuckerberg also made a pledge that they were supposedly going to stop being pushed around. From now on, he swore, there was a new Meta that wouldn’t bow at all to government officials demanding content be removed.

He was a new Zuck. A Zuck who would stand up to oppressive government demands.

So, about that.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly bragged about the Trump administration doing exactly what Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed the Biden administration did to him. She bragged about how the Justice Department successfully pressured Facebook into removing First Amendment-protected speech:

If you can’t see that, it’s Bondi tweeting:

Today following outreach from the Justice Department, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target ICE agents in Chicago. The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.

This is actual government censorship—direct pressure from the DOJ to remove constitutionally protected speech. And unlike the Biden administration’s communications that Zuck admitted he easily refused, in this case, Facebook immediately complied.

The content in question? Tracking the public movements of law enforcement officials. This is classic protected First Amendment activity, with well-established case law protecting the right to record and monitor police in public. It’s nowhere close to meeting the Brandenburg standard for “inciting imminent lawless action” that Bondi misquotes in her tweet.

So, once again, let’s take a step back and look at this. When it was the Biden administration asking Facebook about COVID misinfo, Zuck had no problem saying “well, we’re not going to do that.” And as it became clear Trump had a decent chance of winning the election, it gave Zuck an opportunity to throw the Biden admin under the bus, while insisting that they’d changed and would stop being pressured by governments.

But then, as soon as Bondi calls Zuck and says “jump,” he asks “how high?”

And, of course, it’s not just Zuckerberg who is being a cowardly hypocrite here.

Remember how Judge Terry Doughty, in the Missouri v. Biden case, took similar anecdotes of supposed pressure (which the Supreme Court later rejected, noting that Doughty’s findings were “clearly erroneous” and based on “no evidence”) and claimed that any sign of governments merely communicating with social media companies about moderation practices clearly represented an epic violation of the First Amendment. He said that “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Of course, the Supreme Court eventually laughed that off, because it was based on him both fabricating evidence (including quotes that were not said) and misunderstanding other evidence. But where are the people who cheered on Doughty’s ruling about Bondi’s “massive attack against free speech?”

Or, perhaps, you remember the “Twitter Files” gang of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and new CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, claiming that a few misrepresented stories of government officials asking platforms about their content moderation practices represented the “censorship industrial complex” and were huge attacks on free speech. Matt Taibbi insisted that any suppression of “true speech that undermined confidence in government policies” was “precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.”

Shellenberger touted a supposed whistleblower “proving” that the government “pressured” social media, such as Facebook, to take down content (the actual evidence he presented said no such thing). He’s spent years since then laughably presenting himself as an expert on government and social media “censorship”, even getting a “professorship” at Bari Weiss’s fake university on the subject.

Weiss herself wrote a typically self-congratulating article about how Elon Musk bought Twitter to “save the world” from “censorship” and whined about how government-induced content moderation “curtailed public debate.”

Where are they on this? I see nothing from Taibbi, Shellenberger, or Weiss. Not a single story about this on the CBS-owned The Free Press. Nothing on X from any of them. Nothing on their various Substacks. Just… silence as the Trump administration does the very thing, loudly and proudly, that they spent years falsely accusing Biden of, while claiming it was an attack on the very foundations of democracy. How odd.

Or how about this: top Trump confidant and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went around taking credit for the DOJ getting the page removed from Facebook, just a week after her own lawsuit, which tried to argue that Facebook (and Twitter) did the RICO in banning her, got rejected by the Supreme Court.

That shows Laura Loomer first tweeting about “ICE tracking pages” on Facebook and complaining that Facebook shouldn’t allow them, followed by her breaking the news that the DOJ told her they contacted Facebook to remove them:

Fantastic news. DOJ source tells me they have seen my report and they have contacted Facebook and their executives at META to tell them they need to remove these ICE tracking pages from the platform.

We will see if they comply. There are DOZENS of pages like the one below that endanger the lives of ICE agents.

It’s further evidence Big Tech is continuing to subvert and undermine President Trump and his agenda.

The hypocrisy level here is off the charts. She’s literally spent years suing Facebook for banning her account, claiming it was an attack on her speech… and now she’s demanding that the government tell Facebook to suppress speech, and celebrating when they do so.

The only consistency is “speech I like should be allowed, speech I don’t like shouldn’t be.”

Oh, and remember (lol) the Trump executive order on restoring free speech?

It is the policy of the United States to:

(a)  secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b)  ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen

Bondi clearly violated that.

Will anyone point that out?

Now, because we have enough MAGA trolls around here, I can already predict the reply: “this is different,” they will say, “because this is ‘doxxing’ and a threat to ICE.”

Hell, Bondi even hints at that in her tweet, as well as pretending this fits under the Brandenburg standard of “inciting imminent lawless action” which she misquotes in her tweet. Except that’s bullshit. Simply tracking the location of law enforcement officials in public is not anywhere close to crossing the Brandenburg line. It’s also not “doxxing” in any meaningful manner, which is about revealing private info about someone (and, in most cases, is also not against the law).

It’s classic protected speech, and we’ve got pretty good case law on the books making it clear that recording and tracking law enforcement in public is classic protected First Amendment activity.

So what we’re left with is yet another example of the extreme hypocrisy of the MAGA cult. They claimed, falsely, that Biden was “censoring” social media (a lie debunked by even the conservatives on the Supreme Court) and then as soon as they got into power, they not only did exactly what they falsely accused Biden of doing, but they did so openly, publicly, and proudly.

And where are all those “free speech warriors”? Where are Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Weiss? They were soooooooo concerned that what Biden didn’t actually do was the end of free speech in America. Yet, when Trump does way worse than even what they pretended Biden did… it’s crickets.

How odd.

Or how about Joe Rogan? He spent hours with Zuck, helping him spin a blatantly misleading tale of “censorship” from Biden (which again, even Zuck admitted to Rogan didn’t lead to any speech being taken down). But here, Zuck folded like a cheap card table… and what? Silence?

These grifters spent years telling us that free speech was under attack, but they never had the actual goods. Yet now it’s actually happening, but by the guy they supported, and they’re all off hiding somewhere?

How pathetic.

But this isn’t just about individual hypocrisy—it reveals something more troubling about the entire “free speech” discourse we’ve been subjected to for the past several years. The people who positioned themselves as champions of free speech never actually cared about the principle. They cared about weaponizing the concept to attack their political opponents while laying groundwork for their own censorship regime.

The supposed champions of free speech who spent years manufacturing outrage over nonexistent government censorship are now silent in the face of actual government censorship. Their hypocrisy is complete, and they should never, ever, be seen as credible sources on the subject of free speech.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has revealed himself as exactly what critics always said he was: a coward who bends to whoever holds power. His theatrical resistance to Biden was performative. His instant capitulation to Trump is revealing.

The real lesson here isn’t just that these people are frauds—though they obviously are. It’s that we now have a crystal-clear example of what actual government pressure on speech looks like, versus the manufactured controversies of the past few years. When Bondi tweets about successful DOJ pressure campaigns, when Facebook immediately complies, when demands result in immediate content removal—that’s the difference between real government coercion and the communications that resulted in no platform action, which the Supreme Court found insufficient to establish standing because plaintiffs couldn’t show they were actually harmed.

The free speech grifters won’t learn from this, of course. But the rest of us should.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, bari weiss, content moderation, doxxing, free speech, ice, jawboning, jim jordan, joe rogan, laura loomer, mark zuckerberg, matt taibbi, michael shellenberger, pam bondi
Companies: cbs, facebook, meta