Over the past few months, it has become clear that governments are putting pressure on social media platforms to censor public content.A new email revealed through Missouri vs. Biden It shows that the administration went further and urged Facebook to censor private communications on its WhatsApp messaging service as well.
Facebook (now known as Meta) previously censored its private messaging app. WhatsApp ahead of the 2018 Brazilian presidential election Ban accounts over 100,000 The platform has been used by supporters of populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro to spread “misinformation” amid horror stories.
On February 23, 2022, in Adelanto, California, “all A demonstrator holds up a sign reading ‘End Mandate’. (PATRICK T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
According to an email obtained by a discovery at Missouri vs Biden, The White House has also called for censorship of WhatsApp, following a multistate lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of colluding with tech companies to stifle First Amendment rights in the United States. Multiple emails that began in March 2021 show Biden’s director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, is pressuring his Facebook executives to censor Americans on his WhatsApp. .
via silent lunch:
Flaherty wanted to know what they were doing to reduce the damage done to messaging apps. On March 22, 2021, seemingly unhappy with his previous explanation, he said, “I’m really curious if you don’t see the messages. can you?” he wrote.
Facebook told the White House it was trying to limit virality across its platforms. This will help stop the flow of “misinformation” and reach a wider audience.
As Meta employees described, the suppression tools at their disposal, specifically labeling and message forwarding restrictions, were blunt “content-agnostic” interventions. The premise was that messages not originating from close contacts were likely to contain false information. It helped prevent misinformation.
Flaherty continued to reach out to Facebook for more information about its efforts to stop “vaccine skeptical content.”
In one of the follow-up exchanges, Flaherty appeared unhappy with the response and again pressured Meta to take action against his hesitancy to the vaccine. “I am mostly concerned about what actions and changes you are making to avoid exacerbating our country’s vaccine hesitation problem,” he wrote. “I still don’t have a good empirical answer as to how effective they have been in reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fencesitters.”
While there is no evidence that Facebook complied with the government’s demands, this shows how far the federal government wanted to go: censoring private as well as public messages. Messages should be monitored.
The UK government, ostensibly led by a conservative political party, is also attacking private messaging apps. We are currently considering legislation to force private messaging apps to monitor private messages for illegal content. Signal, a popular cryptocurrency app, said it would withdraw from the UK if such proposals become law.
Allum Bokhari is a senior technical reporter for Breitbart News.he is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s battle to erase the Trump movement and steal the election.
