Democrats have vowed to strip First Amendment protections from independent media outlets to prevent the spread of so-called “misinformation.”
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Mark Warner announced on Thursday that the Biden regime intends to ramp up its pressure on Big Tech companies to aggressively censor non-mainstream content online ahead of the 2024 election.
As the Supreme Court announced the hearing date for the landmark First Amendment case of Murthy v. Missouri (previously Missouri v. Biden), Sen. Warner (D) joined NPR’s “Morning Edition” to voice his position that the government needed to remain in contact with companies like Facebook and Google.
Bizpacreview.com reports: “I think when you’re talking about true misinformation or disinformation, or when you’re talking about utilization of deepfakes where an image…is put up and it’s not us, but it looks like us and sounds like us, I don’t think those are First Amendment protections,” said the governor turned senator Monday.
“I think those are, frankly, just malicious — the kind of manipulation that we’ve already banned from things like public trading in the stock market,” he added suggesting, “The same rules ought to be applicable.”
The comments came after Warner had raised the oft-repeated specter from the Democratic Party of Russia and, shamelessly enough considering the lawfare being used against former President Donald Trump, his concerns about potential election interference.
Presenting the threat of artificial intelligence, host George Louis “A” Martínez introduced the segment by framing the lawmaker’s desire to see more action from President Joe Biden’s administration to combat “disinformation” as he asked about the confidence of a “safe and secure” election.
“Well, A, I wish I could say I was confident, but we may be headed for a perfect storm in terms of election interference,” said Warner. Citing Russia’s war with Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, “election deniers still trying to re-litigate 2020” and legal challenges to state laws passed that restrict platforms from censoring and suppressing otherwise legal content.
Warner had written an amicus brief specifically regarding the Texas case in NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton with the aim of having the Supreme Court reverse the injunction from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I’m trying to say that this does not go to, I don’t believe, the issues of free speech,” he told the host. “It does go to the ability of the government to be able to at least talk to Facebook and Google to say, hey, if you see misinformation — or can we share evidence of Russian activity? How do we cooperate together?”
Cooperating together was the crux of the case in Murthy as the suit, which began with then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, alleged the Biden administration had worked with Big Tech companies to censor and suppress content related to election integrity, COVID-19 and other topics to maintain a narrative.
“What you’re missing is, I think, a very timid Biden administration,” continued Warner. “You’ve got CISA, the cybersecurity information agency that, frankly, did a great job in 2020, actually, even under President Trump, that’s holding back. You’ve got the FBI, which investigates most of the counterintelligence efforts in the country holding off. So this is a concern.”
“I’m trying to push the Biden administration to be a little more aggressive,” added the senator. “But I can — rest assured that there is not the level of communication that existed in 2020 or 2022 or 2018.”
When asked what failure to address his concerns looked like, the Virginia politician said, “You could have chaos. It could change the results. With advancing technology, if we don’t take this as a serious threat to our democracy — and, you know, we’ve got lots of Americans who think 2024 — and I’m one of them, think it’s one of the most important elections in our country’s history in terms of protection of our democracy. We could come out of this at the other end in a very bad spot.”
