Turley: Google Admitting To Censorship Is Vindication For Blacklisted Scientists
FOX News contributor Jonathan Turley on Wednesday reacts to Google's letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) acknowledging coordinating with the Biden administration to censor scientists and others who discussed the COVID pandemic on YouTube.
JON SCOTT, FOX NEWS: Professor, good morning to you. I know you've written about this when it comes to meta. Now you get a chance to write about this when it comes to YouTube and Google. Here's what I think. I mean, my sense is when it came to a national crisis and when it came to free speech, we failed.
JONATHAN TURLEY: We most certainly did, Bill. And I write about this in The Indispensable Right that you had this coordination between the government, corporations, academia, even the media to censor people with opposing views. And it came at a great cost, not just to free speech.
But in COVID, we never had the debate that other countries had. Many of our allies did not shut down their schools, and they have not experienced the psychological and developmental problems that we have experienced. And that's because at platforms like Google and YouTube and Facebook, these scientists were barred. They were banned. They were blacklisted. You know, many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which were scientists that raised opposing views, were at a speech of mine at the University of Chicago over a year ago.
And they have been vindicated in many respects on the stuff that they wanted to get out to the public but were prevented from doing so. But it's also important to remember that, you know, I testified repeatedly in Congress. And before the release of the Twitter files, Democratic members really mocked us and said, oh, you've no evidence of coordination. This is all speculation. It wasn't at that time. But the Twitter files and later the Facebook files showed that coordination. And this is a vindication for those scientists and many others who have been in this fight against Congress to try to get this information out to show the public how extensive this censorship was.
SCOTT: I mean, big tech, free speech, censorship, government control, it's all right there for a guy like you. Here's what the letter said, OK? The administration's officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.
So let's go back to January. Mark Zuckerberg with Joe Rogan. All right.
Talking about Meta, talking about this exact same issue.
ZUCKERBERG: Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse. It just got to this point where we were like, no, we're not going to we're not going to take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.
SCOTT: I sense some pushback there, but I don't know where this all landed, because it it seems to me that Silicon Valley was listening to the government in charge at that time.
TURLEY: Well, it was there was extensive censorship, not just on covid issues, but other issues. Even jokes were being censored at the demand of Biden administration officials. And this is part of censorship. It creates an insatiable desire and appetite. And these companies found themselves overwhelmed. It snowballed. And so soon Meta was just censoring a huge amount of people.
Elon Musk deserves a great deal of credit here. When he bought Twitter, it was interesting. Figures like Hillary Clinton went to Europe and said, use the Digital Services Act, this infamous EU legislative initiative to to censor Americans. And, you know, Musk has been out there alone in this fight. Then Meta joined and has replicated what Musk did at X.
And now we have Google. And this is a huge development for the free speech community. We need these companies, particularly in fending off the EU, which is being very aggressive in this anti free speech campaign.
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