J.D. Vance, a Republican who is trying to run for the U.S. Senate seat from the state of Ohio, was a guest on the episode of SiriusXM's Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow on Monday. Vance stated that the admission by Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, that his company censored information and news regarding Hunter Biden's laptop prior to the 2020 election goes against by the narrative that Big Tech companies operate in a free market.
Mark Zuckerberg, who was a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast on Thursday titled his self-titled podcast, stated that his company had been notified by the FBI about the existence of "Russian disinformation" that was being digitally disseminated and related to reports and specifics about the items that were found on Hunter Biden's laptop.
When asked about Big Tech's filtering of information found on Hunter Biden's laptop, Zuckerberg responded, The FBI, I guess simply came to us — certain individuals on our team and then said Hey just so you understand you must all be on high alert. During the election that took place in 2016, there were a number of things that we believed to be Russian propaganda. We were aware that it was highly possible that there was gonna to be some kind of leak of, or something comparable. So, just be mindful.
Vance highlighted that a majority of the news media did not report on the government's collaboration with tech firms' political boundaries on information accessibility which ought to have called for wall-to-wall media attention for a couple of weeks on the FBI's involvement in Facebook's digital censorship.
Vance made a statement in which he made a reference to the way in which the government undermines the First Amendment by outsourcing its government censorship to large technology businesses that share similar views.
He stated, I think that Big Tech is too dominant, and the conservative should wake up and know what time it is so that they can truly go after these people. [C]onservatives must wake up and realize what era it is so that they can go after these individuals. They say things like, Well, they're a private firm and we adhere to the free market and capitalism, and this is a counterargument that I hear all the time.
It's a great illustration of why that kind of thinking is inadequate, he added, because these people aren't repressing because it's required by market forces. Sometimes the government comes knocking and makes them filter, and then they do something that affects the presidential election.
Marlow called the coordinated censorship by Big Tech and the FBI tantamount to election tampering because of the potential impact information and news about Hunter's laptop could have had on voters' decisions leading up to November 2020.
Independent evaluations, including some undertaken by pro-Biden organizations, suggest that millions of votes were impacted by the media blackout on the Hunter Biden story, which implicates the entire Biden family in wrongdoing, as noted by Vance. It wasn't widely shared on social media because our government told Zuckerberg how to run his digital media company.
He continued by saying, It's a narrative that will shake the world. We are never going to be able to win the long fight until we put a leash on the internet companies and until we take control of the kind of power and influence they have over elections in the United States.
According to Vance, the freedom to speak one's mind and express oneself is essential to the development of a productive American public that is capable of developing better public policy and making better judgements. After doing some research, he reached the conclusion that companies involved in the technology industry, which are backed by the government agencies, are the ones depriving us our fundamental liberties.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on National Insider.