The Right Can't Meme

Shit dude, there are so many. In my opinion the most egregious example, but also the most politically charged, is the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Even if you don't think the actual substance of the claims is true, the government's attempts to censor it are definitely real. But I'm not here to debate the merits of any specific instance of censorship ad nauseam.

At the heart of the matter in general is the question of whether the government should be allowed not to "make" a company censor something, but to "ask" them to "voluntarily remove" it. Technically, that's all they've been doing—and even if they were doing so strictly only in good faith, it would still be contentious to argue that it's ok for government to "strongly suggest", i.e. exert influence over, what companies should and should not allow people to say—but that's not all they've been doing.

What they're doing is exactly what you would expect them to do if they wanted to subvert the system to stay within the technical limits of legality, while getting away with de facto full-blown censorship: bully the companies with lies and threats of reprisal until they complied—they technically don't have to, but it's in their best interest to do so—or, barring their ability to do that, colluding closely with private "watchdog" companies that are the next-best thing to being government entities (they receive and, importantly, depend on significant federal money, hold regular weekly meetings with relevant agencies to discuss agendas, etc) to accomplish the same thing with much the same tactics. The latter is what happened to Twitter immediately after a court barred the current administration from doing the former, and is still happening to them right now, as well as to Rumble, notable for being the biggest YouTube alternative.