Since 2020, every candidate the Democratic Party has nominated for president since 2000 has actively backed restrictions on free speech online, according to a new analysis from the Media Research Center shared with The Daily Wire.
“Since the 2020 election cycle, no less than seven of the most recent 10 presidential nominees have called for censorship and/or government regulation of political speech,” MRC researcher Luis Cornelio found wrote in his analysis.
MRC Free Speech For America analyzed the comments and positions of every presidential candidate since 2000. The group found that every Democrat — and just one Republican — who ran for office in that time frame has backed some kind of restriction on speech since 2020, whether banning “misinformation” or pushing for the government to crack down on free expression.
That includes former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the last of whom has advocated censorship for years. Harris has pushed for social media companies to remove posts from former President Donald Trump and demanded more government oversight and regulation for social media companies.
“They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop,” Harris told CNN in 2019.
The report found that former President Donald Trump had taken steps to promote free speech, citing his efforts in 2020 to define Section 230 — a provision that largely gives tech companies immunity for what third parties allow on their platforms — in a way that protected the First Amendment.
Mitt Romney, who ran for president in 2012, is the only Republican the MRC found to have “voiced support for censorship and against the American principles of free speech online.”
The Biden-Harris administration used several federal agencies to censor speech related to the COVID-19 vaccine, MRC previously documented. This came as Biden claimed that Facebook was “killing people” by allowing posts critical of the COVID vaccine.
“They’re killing people — I mean they’re really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden said on July 16, 2021. “And they’re killing people.”
Hillary Clinton, who has long blamed her 2016 loss to Trump on so-called Russian disinformation, has proposed arresting Americans for spreading “propaganda.”
“I think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases, criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence,” Clinton said on MSNBC last month.
Earlier this month, Clinton urged for social media companies to “moderate” posts, saying on CNN that if “they don’t moderate and monitor content, we lose total control.”
“We should be, in my view, appealing something called Section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be pass-throughs that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted—but we now know that was an overly simple view,” she said.
Obama said back on April 21, 2022 that protecting “democracy” meant more government regulations for online speech.
“Each of us, whether we work at a tech company or consume social media, whether we are a parent, a legislator, an advertiser on one of these platforms, now’s the time to pick a side,” Obama said at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. “We have a choice right now. Do we allow our democracy to wither or do we make it better?”
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Last month, John Kerry, who lost the White House to George W. Bush in 2004, asserted that the First Amendment was a major impediment to fighting alleged online misinformation.
“But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” he said during a World Economic Forum meeting.
Vice President Al Gore, who has made a fortune pushing fear about climate change, compared social media algorithms to AR-15 rifles in December 2023 and called for them to be banned if they lead people in a certain direction.
“If you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like pitcher plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15s,” Gore said. “They ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned. It’s an abuse of the public forum.”
Romney, the only Republican on the list, was included because of comments he made during a congressional hearing in July 2023 where he seemed to endorse federal government employees pressuring tech companies to restrict certain posts.
“Employees of the federal government have First Amendment rights, too,” Romney said. “Censorship is when the government shuts something off. This is arguing to try to convince somebody else to shut it off and that’s the right people have whether they’re in government or outside of government.”
