(WND News Center) — The soon-to-be-booted chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, is insisting that Big Tech continue to let the government direct its censorship programs – or else.
That’s the warning he is delivering, according to a report from New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.
She explained he was on CNN over the weekend “to issue barely veiled threats to Elon Musk for trying to restore free speech on Twitter.”
READ: Latest ‘Twitter Files’ release shows FBI paid over $3 million for censorship requests
Schiff – whose long-running claims that the debunked “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory launched by his party against President Donald Trump during the 2016 election are true has, for many, cast doubt on virtually anything he says – complained his problem now is “with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.”
Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, in fact, has made multiple moves that would restore free speech to the platform, after several years of censorship by Democrats in the federal government, through several programs that in recent weeks have been fully revealed. One of those major controversies concerned social media’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which even leftist publications now have admitted is all truth.
READ: Biden admin denies involvement in Big Tech censorship despite bragging about it last year
The problem is that the government is forbidden by the Constitution from censoring ordinary speech, but private organizations can on their own platforms, and that’s what officials in the government arranged to have happen.
But Schiff threatened that social media companies soon may not continue to have “immunity from responsibility and liability,” if they do pursue free speech on their platforms.
Devine explained, “In other words, keep policing free speech as an arm of the federal government or watch your business go up in smoke.”
READ: Twitter suspends several left-wing journalists for doxxing Elon Musk’s ‘real-time location’
Continuing, she wrote: “Schiff is a calculated propagandist, who lies under oath as easily as breathing, and knowingly peddles misinformation to Congress and to media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, whose gullible hosts keep bringing him back on their shows to mislead their audiences. In the dying days of his powerful reign as overseer of the nation’s intelligence agencies, abusing his access to the nation’s secrets, Schiff’s final assignment is to preserve the censorship regime his side of politics entrenched across Big Tech.”
Devine said Schiff and other Democrats had written “a menacing letter” just days earlier to Facebook threatening that if it followed Twitter’s path of free speech, the consequences would be negative.
READ: Tucker Carlson finds it awfully suspicious that former gov’t intel officials worked for Twitter
They demanded that what they define as “dangerous and unfounded election denial content” be suppressed.
“It was what law professor Jonathan Turley characterized as a ‘hold-the-line warning… meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship.’”
He suggested, “If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate.”
READ: Trump unveils plan to fight online censorship, stop gov’t collusion with Big Tech
Devine noted that leftists are panicking because their secrets are “leaking.”
“Ever since Musk authorized a group of independent journalists to release the Twitter Files three weeks ago, a steady drip of damning evidence has emerged, showing collusion between Twitter and the federal government, including the FBI, to censor Americans and suppress dissent, in violation of the First Amendment,” she explained. “In particular we have seen how the FBI, in weekly meetings with Twitter, pre-bunked The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, persuading Twitter to suppress the story and lock down our account for more than two weeks.”
“As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in Twitter Files part 6, Twitter was acting as a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI, in a relationship he described as ‘master–canine,’” she said.
READ: New ‘Twitter Files’ release shows FBI flagged accounts, treated platform like ‘subsidiary’
Taibbi confirmed communications from the FBI to Twitter were “constant and pervasive,” and the law enforcement agency, “instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents – lots of them – analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.”
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.