Late last year, YouTube announced plans to reinstate accounts that had been banned at the behest of the Biden Administration for posting alleged COVID-19 misinformation. The announcement likely came as a relief to groups like the Children’s Health Defense Fund, a group associated with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and to Senator Ron Johnson; both of whom were punished by the social media giant for posting videos that ran contrary to the Biden administration’s official policy on the COVID-19 vaccine and on COVID-19 treatments.
This is a good move. But we should remember, it wasn’t just YouTube that decided to punish speech disapproved by the prior administration.
A report by the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government contains damning evidence that the Biden Administration leaned on social media companies to censor anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report details how Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube all shadowbanned or removed content that was critical of the administration’s official stance on the vaccines, the origin of the virus, and more.
The administration’s actions were reckless, and endangered more than just our societal freedom of speech.
For one thing, while it might be tempting to think that the Biden Administration only censored crackpots and conspiracy theorists, the truth is far worse. The report details how the Biden administration leaned on Facebook to censor the “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origins, a theory that’s now seen as highly plausible. It similarly asked Facebook to censor “negative information on or opinions about the vaccine,” and internal emails from Facebook report that ““The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects.”
Prominent scientists who opposed the administration’s position on lockdowns, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (current head of the National Institutes of Health) were blacklisted by social media platforms. At the administration’s behest, videos featuring Bhattacharya were removed from YouTube.
All of this did immense damage to our truth-seeking apparatus, during a time when finding the truth could not have been more important. When Facebook dragged its feet on censoring certain content, President Biden publicly accused them of “killing people.” But the same accusation could be made against the Biden Administration itself: by censoring scientific debate during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the administration virtually guaranteed that its response would be worse than if prominent critics were allowed to voice their concerns.
Some proponents of censorship argue that the more important an issue is, the more justification there is for censorship. This makes a superficial kind of sense: after all, nobody wants hucksters selling snake oil to take advantage of sick people by claiming that they’re curing cancer. But more often, the inverse is true: the higher the stakes of a given issue, the more essential it is that experts on all sides be allowed to voice their concerns freely. By preventing this robust scientific debate, the Biden administration ensured that the policies it implemented (including lockdowns and vaccine mandates) were worse than if prominent critics had been given a seat at the table.
The Biden Administration’s actions also took a sledgehammer to institutional trust in America, which has fallen to concerning levels. The decline of institutional trust worries critics across the political spectrum, from progressives concerned that our society is becoming anti-science to conservatives like Yuval Levin, for a simple reason: our society works better when we trust our institutions and when, in turn, they show themselves to be trustworthy.
By politicizing the scientific debate about the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden Administration did profound damage to institutional trust. A study by Pew finds that in April 2020, 87 percent of Americans “had confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” By late 2023, that number had fallen to 73 percent. By summer of 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had only a 33 percent approval rating among Republicans. Many on the left chalk this trend up to Republicans being anti-science, but the House Judiciary report tells a different story: many on the right lost trust in an institution that they justifiably saw as having been shamelessly politicized.
Trust in news has plummeted as well. In 2019, 18 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in television news. By 2024, that number had fallen to 12 percent. In 2019, 23 percent of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in newspapers; by 2024, that number was just 18 percent. There are multiple reasons for this decline in trust, but it’s hard to see evidence of the administration jawboning companies into censoring so-called “misinformation” on COVID-19 and not conclude that many Americans are simply tired of feeling lied to by the news.
The other problem created by the administration has to do with what economist Robert Higgs calls the “ratchet effect.” Here’s how Michael Matulef describes the phenomenon:
The ratchet effect theory, as popularized by Robert Higgs in his book Crisis and Leviathan, refers to the tendency of governments to respond to crises by implementing new policies, regulations, and laws that significantly enhance their powers. These measures are typically presented as temporary solutions to address specific problems. However, in history, these measures often outlast their intended purpose and become a permanent part of the legal landscape.
One danger of the Biden Administration’s actions is that they can become precedents for future administrations to further erode free speech protections in future crises. The Biden administration inured people to having their freedom of speech censored in the name of public health, which makes it that much more likely that we’ll be equally willing to shrug off future abuses. When it comes to free speech, we the people can feel like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of increasingly hot water, and it should concern all of us whenever an administration decides to increase the temperature by a few degrees.
When we’re discussing freedom of speech, First Amendment defenders can be strident about the principles involved; as more than one First Amendment absolutist has argued, even if there were no practical benefit to free speech beyond letting people speak freely, it would still be worth defending.
That’s true, but we shouldn’t let ourselves forget that the First Amendment is also a profoundly practical tool for building a good society. When governments censor their people, they do profound damage to the truth-seeking apparatus and risk people’s lives and livelihoods with poorly-thought-out policies. They damage the institutional trust that keeps society functioning. No matter what we think of the arguments made by lockdown resistors and COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, we should be appalled that our government tried to censor them.
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