JD Vance Thinks Social Media Bans Are Tyranny—Except When They Benefit Him
Disinformation, censorship, and hypocrisy.
JD VANCE’S REPEATED REFUSAL to answer a straightforward question—“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”—deservedly became the highlight of his New York Times interview. But equally notable is the method of his evasion: suggesting that the integrity of the election was compromised because “big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Vance had tried a similar deflection in the vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz, pivoting away from a question about January 6th by claiming that the real threat to democracy is censorship by “government and Big Tech” and attempting to counter Walz with a non sequitur: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”
First, the hypocrisy: Vance was decrying Big Tech “censorship” even as Elon Musk was censoring—as Vance would put it—a hacked and leaked dossier about Vance himself at the request of the Trump campaign.1
Hypocrisy aside, the “censorship” narrative and the attempt to equate it to election theft is absurd. For one thing, Twitter’s decision back in 2020 to ban links to the New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop—a ban that lasted all of two days—almost certainly had the “Streisand effect” of making the story bigger. (While Facebook took measures to minimize the article’s reach because of questions about its credibility, it nonetheless garnered more than 54 million views just between October 14 and October 23.) The laptop scandal was also widely discussed in the traditional media.
If taken seriously, Vance’s theory of election illegitimacy would have sweeping repercussions. If candidates could contest an election as “stolen” because the campaign didn’t measure up to some subjective ideal of fairness, then Hillary Clinton would have plentiful reason to claim that the 2016 election was stolen from her. Russian hacking and WikiLeaks releases reinforcing the false narrative that she cheated Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination; FBI director James Comey’s eleventh-hour letter to Congress suggesting new evidence in the investigation into her emails which turned out to be a bust—take your pick. For that matter, if the “suppression” of Hunter’s laptop compromised the election, why not the suppression of the Steele dossier? Yes, that dossier had a lot of bogus information, but the “censored” New York Post story about the laptop was built entirely around a bogus claim: that Joe Biden used his clout as vice president to protect a Ukrainian company to which Hunter Biden had ties.
BEYOND THESE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of alleged censorship, Vance’s larger claim is that freedom in America is in danger from “industrial-scale” speech policing by an unholy alliance of the nanny state and Big Tech. This narrative has long animated both the Trumpist right and the Trump-adjacent left (e.g., Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi). As you might guess, both sides offer it with a generous helping of bad faith.
Nonetheless, genuine concerns over both government pressures to regulate social media content and ham-fisted moderation by large social media companies should not be discounted. Such concerns have been voiced by nonpartisan free-speech advocates such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and they are shared by quite a few liberals and moderates as well as principled conservatives.
Even so, Vance’s censorship panic goes far beyond these reasonable concerns; it elides basic facts. The claim that Harris “censored” protected American speech about COVID-19 not only attributes to her a role she didn’t have in the Biden administration but also revives allegations of a Biden administration censorship scheme that have already been rejected by the Supreme Court. Last June, notorious lefty Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion in Murthy v. Missouri (joined by John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Court’s three liberal justices), ruling that administration officials had not violated the First Amendment by talking to Facebook and Twitter executives about COVID misinformation. While some of the majority’s reasoning had to do with standing, the ruling also concluded that there was no evidence that the social media companies’ moderation decisions were linked to pressure from the administration.
And, once again, the partisan hypocrisy is striking. In the right-wing narrative, a Biden White House official asking Twitter employees why COVID disinfo superspreader Alex Berenson hadn’t been banned from the platform amounts to censorship (even if it was another five months before Twitter banned Berenson’s account). But when the Florida Department of Health under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis threatens local TV stations with criminal penalties for airing a supposedly misleading campaign ad attacking DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban? Never mind. President Biden telling a reporter in July 2021 that social media platforms are “killing people” by failing to curb anti-vaccine propaganda? Censorship. Then-President Trump attacking the media as “fake news” and “human scum,” targeting specific news organizations and reporters, and musing that maybe NBC and other networks should have their licenses revoked? That’s just Trump being Trump.
Trump has been making similar threats, much more aggressively, during his presidential campaign this year. Just last week in a Truth Social post and in a speech in Detroit, he declared that CBS should lose its broadcasting license for a supposedly misleading edit of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview. Last month, he made the same threat against ABC because he didn’t like the fact-checking during his debate with Harris. And in January in a speech in New Hampshire, he said that CNN and NBC “should have their licenses or whatever they have taken away” because they didn’t air the entirety of his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses live.
As President, Trump wouldn’t have the power to yank any network’s license unless he somehow were actually to suspend the Constitution. But the fact remains that this is a clear, explicit call for political censorship by the man who wants to be president of the United States. Where’s JD Vance’s complaint about that?
Illiberal progressivism poses its own threats to free speech, but those threats take a back seat to preventing such a man’s return to the White House. And, more often than not, complaints about progressive censorship from the right are simply excuses or distractions meant to provide cover for the right’s authoritarian agenda—from red states trying to control moderation on privately owned online platforms to JD Vance using the censorship bogeyman as a de facto defense of his running mate’s attempted hijacking of the last election.
The journalist who published it was suspended from X for more than two weeks; coincidentally or not, he was reinstated, supposedly on “free speech principles,” the day after the New York Times reported that the Trump–Vance campaign had “connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the [dossier] on the platform.”