When Facebook (now Meta) scooped up WhatsApp, it was already a wildly popular cross-platform, international person-to-person communications app for text, voice, or video.
But recently-acquired emails between the White House and Meta show that the government has been interested in far more than just suppressing ‘misinformation’ as spread in the online version of the community bulletin board (eg. social media).
That kind of government-driven overreach as outlined in the Twitter Files was outrageous enough as far as First Amendment violations go.
But what the WH was strongarming Meta to do with WhatsApp takes that obscene intrusion into the speech of an individual even further.
Users of WhatsApp were pitched the idea of this service being an encrypted communication between two parties — meaning that nobody other than the sender and receiver of the information has any knowledge about the content.
David Zweig has been looking at emails between the government and Meta that have been made public through discovery in the Missouri v Biden case, and he is reporting on some horrifying abuse of governmental authority originating directly from the Biden White House almost from Day One.
His substack goes into some detail and provides screenshots of the actual emails. But here is part of his summary:
Questioning Meta executives about what actions could be taken on a service that people use specifically for private communications is a striking departure from other efforts.
In multiple emails, as early as March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the Biden White House’s Director of Digital Strategy, pressed Meta executives to tell him what interventions the company had taken on WhatsApp.
Flaherty wanted to know what they were doing to reduce harm on the messaging app. Seemingly dissatisfied with earlier explanations, on March 22, 2021, he wrote, “If you can’t see the message, I’m genuinely curious—how do you know what kinds of messages you’ve cut down on?” — “Biden White House Pressured Meta To Moderate Texts On WhatsApp”, David Zweig
Team Biden trying to suppress the direct, encrypted conversations between private individuals is the 21st Century equivalent of the government intercepting a snail-mail letter between two private citizens.
Leave it to Team Biden to put intercepting private communications between citizens as one of their top priorities just days after taking office.
Remember when we raised concerns about how many people in the Biden White House had deep BigTech connections?
Our instincts were spot on. If anything, they understated the danger.
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