It looks like Uncle Joe is pulling out all the stops to prevent President Donald Trump from defeating him in November. Recently, it was revealed that the former vice president’s campaign sent a letter to Facebook imploring them to censor posts from the Trump campaign.
The letter, which was addressed to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice President for Global Affairs, argued that President Trump’s Facebook posts should be suppressed because of his claims about the risk of voter fraud related to mail-in voting and his supposed tendency to post “hateful content.”
Biden campaign manager Jen O’ Malley Dillon, who penned the letter, urged the social media company to take a more active role in suppressing content posted by the Trump team. “As I am sure you will agree, it is absolutely vital that the American public clearly understand what it is that Facebook has so far committed — or declined — to do in order to protect against abuse of its platform to suppress the vote or incite violence,” she wrote.
Dillon also claimed that data revealed that “conservative leaning outlets were pushing more content that violated [Facebook’s] policies” than left-leaning outlets.
The letter comes as others on the left are attempting to curb the president’s ability to get his message to the American people through social media. Last month, Twitter placed a fact-check on one of Trump’s tweets arguing against mail-in voting. This action caused an uproar on conservative Twitter and sparked a movement in which right-leaning users signed up with Parler, an alternative social media service that promises not to censor content or ban users.
This censorious attempt on the part of the Biden campaign is just one of many leftist voices calling for the president’s silencing on social media. Even employees of the company have taken issue with Zuckerberg’s refusal to throttle Trump’s posts and crack down on speech they deem to be hateful.
In the letter, the Biden campaign attempted to shame the company into altering its algorithm to root out content that is “divisive and inflammatory. Dillon wrote, “The question is whether your platform’s algorithm should continue to amplify that material to the attention of tens of millions of people because it is divisive and inflammatory. The answer to that question is no, which should be clearer now than ever before.”
The left is continuing to apply pressure to social media companies to censor right-leaning speech under the guise of targeting only extremists. Corporations have resorted to advertising boycotts to force Facebook’s hand. However, this particular tactic will likely not reap any positive results for the censorious left.
At first, it was employees working within social media companies that were engaging in discriminatory practices based on political beliefs. But now the censorship problem has become even worse. The notion that a presidential campaign would attempt to pressure a business to suppress content that it doesn’t approve of is chilling.
If Biden were to win, would this be the end of his effort to silence a conservative candidate? Not likely. The far-left progressive crowd has already demonstrated that they prefer to squelch opposing views rather than engage in debate. The question is, will they succeed?
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
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