The implication of saying they were "pressed" by the Biden admin (as they claim in the letter) is that Google was unwilling. I don't buy that. They were complicit and are now throwing the Biden admin under the bus because it is politically convenient. Just like how the Twitter files showed that Twitter was complicit in it.

Well of course they’re going to say that they resisted doing the bad thing, even though they still did the bad thing. All it took to get them to do the bad thing was for someone to ask them to do it, but they really resisted as hard as they could, honest.

Note, that in their letter they carefully avoided mention what happened during Trump 1.0 administration. Their policies started before Biden was president, so this is 100% throwing Biden admin under the bus.

Do you think that they should omit those facts? That they should fail to mention that the Biden administration used them to censor Americans?

The language they're using implies the Biden admin pressured them to censor (which, as pointed out, doesn't make sense because they were doing it before Biden too), rather than just admitting that they were complicit with the Biden admin to do it.

Yea, but we can see through their self-serving language. The fact is they decided on a policy of banning “misinformation” that the Biden administration turned into a censorship machine. One is misguided, the other is a crime.

The 1st amendment doesn't prevent the government from making suggestions to private companies. They aren't allowed to coerce them into censoring things. So it still isn't a crime.

What the Biden admin did was not acceptable, and even at the time I got plenty of heat from HN for thinking that it was a sketchy loophole for the government to use, that it was against the spirit of the law.

I'm trying to emphasize the distinction because the companys' self-serving language is going to be abused to claim that the current admin - that has just threatened to sue a TV channel for bringing back a show they tried to threaten the channel into getting rid of - is actually a defender of free speech.

Ok, I see what you are saying, but I don’t think that there is a loophole here.

The Executive Branch may only take actions that the Constitution allows (same as the Legislative). These are called the Enumerated Powers. Some of them are simple, like requiring the President to give a State of the Union Address. Others are more complex, like allowing the Executive Branch to negotiate treaties. But it then says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” So anything not in the Executive Branch’s enumerated powers is illegal for them to do.

Of course, one of their enumerated powers is to execute any law passed by the Legislature. That is quite open–ended, because Congress can pass any kind of law that they want, right? Well, no. The First Amendment specifically says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” So we know that there is no law authorizing the the Executive Branch from censoring speech or the press. Thus, the actions of the Biden Administration were illegal. They were explicitly forbidden from taking those actions by the Constitution, and they did it anyway.

If you read those documents, you will see that the administration was telling them that those accounts were in violation of Twitter TOS. They simply said "hey, this user is violating your TOS, what are you gonna do about it?", and Twitter simply applied their rules.

That was after they had changed the TOS to make it against the rules to talk about certain topics, such as gain of function research at Chinese labs that was funded by researchers that were themselves funded by the US government.

Which is still a debunked theory. Nobody created SARS-CoV-2 for nefarious purposes. The best theory we have is that there was a failure in the contention. But people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead, when plain human failures explain everything.

I never said that it was created for nefarious purposes. That was you projecting or creating a straw man to attack.

What part of "people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead" was missed? I don't care what you think it happened, I just don't want to hear more conspiration. I'm tired of that. We are humans, therefore, we are stupidly imperfect creatures. There isn't anything to learn about the event, other than humans gonna human.

Except that a lot of what was banned were _not_ conspiracy theories. The truth is that the NIH _did_ fund gain of function research and that research _was_ conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those are the facts that the government worked so hard to suppress our knowledge of. And they were able to use Google’s policies of suppressing “misinformation” to do it for several years.