The Empire Strikes Back

JD Vance Dossier I reported is now blocked by Meta and even Google

Mark Zuckerberg testifying to Congress

The largest Internet companies — Meta (Facebook) and Google — swiftly censored the J.D. Vance research dossier that I published this week, following X’s move to ban me and stop the circulation of the Trump campaign document.

The platforms said that the alleged Iranian origin of the dossier — which no one is calling fake or altered —  necessitated removing any links to the document. These very same companies had earlier promised not to remove content for political reasons. Even Google Drive restricts users from sharing the dossier. 

The major media had been sitting on the Vance document for months despite the obvious newsworthiness of a campaign document about a Vice Presidential nominee. I was quite clear in my article that it was presumably from an Iranian hack. I sought and published a critical comment to that effect from the Trump campaign’s spokesperson. I also included a summary of the intelligence community evidence of Iran’s hack-and-leak operations targeting the campaign.

But now the empire strikes back — fearful of running afoul of the federal government’s war on foreign influence, about which there is something of a moral panic today. These are powerful forces. Very. 

The decision by Meta companies Instagram, Facebook and Threads to restrict access to my news article is considerably more significant than X (Twitter). Whereas X says it has about 250 million daily active users, Meta says its platforms have over 3 billion active users. And unlike X, which is hiding behind the pretext that my news article violates their policy on “private information,” Meta just came out and said what this is really all about: fear of foreign influence. 

Again, as I made very clear in my article about the dossier, it was very likely hacked by the Iranian government. Where Meta disagrees is in thinking the American people aren’t intelligent enough to account for that. This flies in the face of assurances by Meta as recently as August, when a top executive said that “we learned our lesson” about removing other content for political reasons.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in a letter to Congress in August. In the letter, Zuckerberg expresses regret for the decision, as he puts it, to “censor” content due to pressure from the White House. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” 

Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, was similarly apologetic when testifying before Congress on September 18. His remarks were actually quite thoughtful, conveying regret about the company’s past decision to restrict access to a news article about the Hunter Biden laptop, but also explaining how widespread panic, government pressure and heat of the moment thinking led to poor content moderation decisions. Said Clegg:

“I think we learned our lesson, certainly as META is concerned, that in the heat of the moment, when governments and its governments around the world exert particular pressure on us, on particular classes of content, which they are particularly focused on, we need to act.”  Always, and we strive to do this, but of course we make mistakes. We need to act independently, and we need to be resistant to the sort of passing moods and passions around particular bits of content, which was particularly the case during the pandemic. People were, in effect, in a panic.”

We’re in the heat of the moment again today, this time about Iran. Some actually believe that Tehran could significantly influence the presidential election. It is an absurd proposition characteristic of a far more serious problem: that the federal government is fighting the last war vis a vis Russian interference in 2016. Unfortunately for the American public, that government effort has resulted in less access to information.

With Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s leader and other top figures last week, and with Israel’s bombing in Yemen, it’s clearer than ever that Gaza is now a regional war. But still the Biden administration insists that it is deterring a “regional” conflict, which really means direct war in Iran. Here at home, the feds  continue to obsess over Iranian backing of pro-Palestinian protesters and sentiments. To fight Iran, the feds are spying on student protesters, with Congress even pressuring the FBI to penetrate the demonstrations with informants, as I’ve reported. If this isn’t a panic, I don’t know what is. And, as Clegg pointed out, it’s times like these that it’s most important to be vigilant about respecting the sanctity of free expression. Looking at the smoldering mess the Middle East is in, what we need now is more debate, not less.

As to the question of Iranian influence on our elections, I believe the source of the dossier was Iran. I made this clear in the first sentence of the article I wrote about it, because I believe that people are mature enough to account for Iran’s motives and come to their own conclusions. I’m also no fan of the Iranian regime, which people who followed me on X the day of its late president Ebrahim Raisi’s death by helicopter crash this May might know based on my sarcastic tweet that day. 

One of the reasons I don’t like governments like Iran is their tyrannical insistence on control. Conversely, for all my criticism of the administration and the national security state, I love my country. Only in America could someone like me, the child of two immigrant parents with no connections and a flyover state Wisconsin cheesehead be able to get a story like this out to the public without fear of government reprisal. That spirit of freedom is exactly what I was trying to uphold in my small way when I published the dossier. 

Mr. Zuckerberg, if you’re reading this, I sincerely hope that you take your own advice and resist the panic.

— Edited by William M. Arkin