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February 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In a recently leaked video of an internal meeting at Facebook, a top executive said that “ideally” governments should be ruling on issues such as the indefinite suspension of former President Donald Trump from the platform.
The video in question was part of a larger drop recently released by Project Veritas and includes a statement by the former U.K. deputy prime minister, and now the media giant’s vice-president for Global Affairs and Communications, Sir Nick Clegg.
Referencing criticism from world leaders of Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend Trump from the platform, Clegg, a past leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, said: “Ideally, we wouldn’t be making these decisions on our own. We would be taking these decisions in line with and in conformity with democratically agreed rules and principles. And at the moment, those democratically agreed rules don’t exist. We still have to make decisions in real-time.”
Commenting on the leaked videos, conservative media analyst Mark Dice added that Facebook is eager to work with governments to create rules governing online censorship, in order that their own policies will be enforced across all other social media platforms.
“In the fourth quarter earnings call with investors last week, Zuckerberg confirmed, what I've been telling you – that he wants the Democrat-controlled congress to amend section 230 of the Communications Decency Act mandating social media platforms to censor or moderate, as he says, ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech,’” Dice explained.
“If you're wondering why he would want a law mandating what his site has to take down and what's not allowed, it's because he'll consult with the government to create that law and it'll be the exact same policies that they have now,” he continued.
“But the Facebook policies will become law, and what that'll do is it'll just bankrupt other free speech platforms like Gab, BitChute, Rumble, Parler, and others, because then the law will be selectively enforced when the government finds certain posts that violate the law. Then they'll just fine them into bankruptcy.”
Regarding Clegg’s mention of “democratically agreed rules and principles,” Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy and Government Affairs at American Principles Project, told LifeSiteNews that over the last few years “we have seen (from the left) a kind of … bastardization of what democracy means.”
The agenda to censor reflected in phrases such as “misinformation is a threat to democracy,” is self-contradictory, he explained. “It is democracy to have different opinions and to battle them out in the marketplace of ideas.”
“What they are saying basically is that you can ‘democratically’ setup rules to oppress a political minority,” Schweppe said.
“This is why our form of government is so brilliant, by having the Bill of Rights,” including the first amendment’s freedom of speech clause, which serves to protect “political minority groups,” he said.
And thus, Schweppe concluded, “I think that this effort by the authoritarian left is a design to use ‘democracy’ to maintain their power and prevent their political opponents from ever gaining any sort of power again.”
In an email correspondence with LifeSiteNews, Dan Gainor, Vice President of TechWatch at the Media Research Center, offered another motivation for Facebook to push for government censorship of online speech.
He affirmed that for some time “Facebook has been begging regulators to restrict content” on social networks. If that happens, the tech giant “can work the rules in a way to limit new competitors and also censor conservative speech it doesn’t like.”
“Only huge companies have the financial and technical resources to moderate content at a large scale,” said Gainor. “So, regulations would effectively kill smaller social media operations before they could compete with Facebook.”
Schweppe agreed, stating any such censorship regulations are going to “benefit a huge company like Facebook over any of their smaller competitors,” because such regulations are “going to be really hard for a competitor to adhere to.”
Describing influencers in these decisions as “techno-fascist employees” at the social network “that want to see censorship of conservative ideas in mass on the platform,” and “democrats in power” who support the same “crackdown on speech,” Schweppe summarizes that this mindset is “part of the left’s … hatred of free speech and free expression. They’ve become a much more authoritarian movement. And Facebook is kind of the corporate wing of that.”
Gainor adds that the network is attempting to subvert the standards of free speech enjoyed by Americans, and gain a certain moral and legal legitimacy by applying instead “international standards” which are significantly more restrictive.
Recently, Facebook’s own Oversight Board ruled that they had gone too far in censoring an October post in France which promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a treatment for COVID-19. The social media platform removed the post last year, saying that it caused a “risk of offline harm” due to “misinformation.”
Despite enormous evidence that HCQ provides highly effective treatment for patients suffering from COVID-19, Facebook, along with other Big Tech monopolies have been censoring such information for months.
Last year, Facebook removed a hugely popular video by America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD) in which they discussed the effectiveness of HCQ to treat COVID-19. After the video went “viral”, being viewed 17 million times in 8 hours, various Big Tech giants, including Facebook, removed it for violating their “misinformation” policies.
In a more recently released video AFLD founder, Dr. Simone Gold, explainedthe tremendous success HCQ has provided around the world including in India and Africa.
“So, in America the death rates are in the 800 range per million,” she stated. “In Africa, Sub-Sahara Africa, the poorest places in the world, no social distancing, no mask, no ICU’s, they have a death rate of one percent the western nations. One percent!”
“Now I believe it is due to widely available HCQ. I don’t think you can explain it for any other reason,” she said.
A white paper released by the organization provides thorough documentation demonstrating how “(c)ountries where HCQ is widely available … have 1-10 percent of the death rates of first world nations where HCQ is severely restricted.”
Noting the irony of her organization being aggressively censored on this topic for “risk of offline harm” due to “misinformation,” Dr. Gold tweeted: “Facebook just announced it ‘made a mistake’ when it censored studies showing HCQ saves lives. Censorship is never ‘a mistake.’ Tech executives repeatedly made a calculated decision, month after month, silencing physicians worldwide. Censorship kills.”
Facebook just announced it “made a mistake” when it censored studies showing HCQ saves lives. Censorship is never “a mistake.” Tech executives repeatedly made a calculated decision, month after month, silencing physicians worldwide.
Censorship kills.https://t.co/TX0g8lPxUx pic.twitter.com/nh1f9lwDNc
— Dr. Simone Gold (@drsimonegold) January 28, 2021
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