The Biden administration is now being accused of being "fascists" after revealing that it is working with Facebook to take down certain posts it disagrees with about COVID-19 and vaccination.
Glenn Greenwald, an American lawyer, journalist, and author of "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," has called out the Biden administration after it announced it is working with Big Tech company Facebook to combat misinformation about COVID to encourage more people to get vaccinated for the disease. The 54 year old journalist and critic took to social media to decry the government's "flagging [of] problematic posts [on] Facebook."
"The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as 'problematic' so that Facebook can remove them," Greenwald wrote on Twitter. "This is the union of corporate and state power-one of the classic hallmarks of fascism-that the people who spent 5 years babbling about fascism support."
The White House is slowly blurring the lines when it comes to free speech. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's admission that the Biden administration is working with Big Tech to monitor "misinformation" was met with intense backlash, especially among conservatives who often find themselves silenced by the left.
According to Faithwire, the Biden administration is closely working with Big Tech because it failed to meet President Joe Biden's goal of vaccinating up to 70% of the entire American population by the Fourth of July. Fox News reported that a spokesperson told NBC's Dylan Byers, "The White House is looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals."
"Now is our moment to really double down on our vaccination efforts and other prevention interventions," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said.
A large number of Americans remain unvaccinated and these are the very people who are at a higher risk for getting COVID, health authorities say. They add that the new cases of COVID are among patients who did not get vaccinated. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said during a White House press conference that two-thirds of people who refused to get the vaccine also believe common myths about it.
Now, the Biden administration is changing its tactics especially when the country is posting an average of 25,300 new COVID cases daily, twice the number reported in June. Aside from the president's door to door campaign to target the vaccine hesitant, the Biden administration is also looking to quash what they believe is misinformation online, including what they call "myths"
Greenwald argued on Twitter that there is "no circumstance in which it's acceptable" for the government to be "providing lists to Facebook of 'problematic' content it wants removed" and that "the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment's free speech guarantee is violated when government officials pressure or coerce private actors to censor for them."
According to Fox News, Murthy's office issued a new report titled "Confronting Health Misinformation," which details guidelines for social media platforms to "impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies," a move that censors what the left believes is misinformation.
