Former President Barack Obama had some harsh criticism for Big Tech platforms that allow free speech, while delivering remarks at the June 17 Connecticut Forum.
Obama lamented that America had lost its “monoculture” and no longer unanimously listened to legacy media sources such as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite or TIME Magazine. Obama lamented that Americans are divided on the facts and not the issues. This is rich, particularly coming from a man whose political party claims that men can switch genders and have babies. After placing the blame on his political opponents and Big Tech greed, Obama proposed that the media and the government had a role to play.
“Part of what we're going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion,” Obama said. “We want diversity of opinion. We don't want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things? That I think is one of the big tasks of social media.”
The former president even threw the government in the mix too: “By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models.”
Obama quickly added the fig leaf claim that the government would somehow respect the First Amendment while pressuring platforms that allow free speech to do its bidding. “Look there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence, voices,” Obama said, describing such a task as a “big challenge for all of us that we're going to have to undertake.”
Obama did not mention that the government has already tried putting the clamps on social media, mostly in secret. MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled a list of 57 Biden-era censorship initiatives involving 90 government agencies, many of which targeted free speech on social media. For example, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recruited local officials to find content they disapproved of, allowing the agency to push social media platforms to remove tweets, posts and other content. Government officials also pressured Amazon to remove books—as described in the MRC’s report on Initiative #21—and pushed Meta to remove content they didn’t like on the COVID-19 Pandemic (Initiative #20).
Read More: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives
But many of these platforms were more than willing to censor on their own. They even silenced Donald Trump, the president of the United States. In 2021, Trump was banned from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, TikTok and even platforms like Stripe, Reddit and Shopify.
Since then, some of the largest platforms have made public commitments to allow free speech. After buying Twitter (now X) in 2022, tech mogul Elon Musk restored banned accounts such as satire website The Babylon Bee, ended policies banning free speech on Transgenderism, and drastically reduced the headcount of employees dedicated to censoring content.
Earlier this year, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to “get rid of fact-checkers” on his platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Threads. He also committed to censoring less content and called for America to protect Big Tech companies from foreign pressure to censor.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
