Chris Lange, FISM News
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The House Judiciary GOP said that a comment it posted criticizing President Biden’s $300 billion student loan forgiveness plan was tagged as violating Facebook’s “community standards,” preventing anyone else from seeing the post.
“WOW: @facebook says our post about paying back loans violates their “community standards.” Big Tech’s at it again,” the group wrote in a tweet Wednesday that included the original post with a screenshot of the violation notice.
The post at issue simply read: “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”
WOW: @facebook says our post about paying back loans violates their “community standards.”
Big Tech’s at it again. pic.twitter.com/Oo5lESfxwU
— House Judiciary GOP 🎄 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 25, 2022
The report is just the latest among multiple instances of Big Tech censorship that overwhelmingly target conservatives, particularly those critical of the Biden administration.
Facebook, along with others, has long been accused of running interference for the Biden administration, beginning with its suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The social media behemoth has also been accused of censoring COVID-19 information and posts questioning or criticizing Critical Race Theory instruction in schools.
GOP lawmakers in March began laying the groundwork for investigations into allegations that Big Tech colluded with the Biden administration to block the Hunter Biden laptop story to influence an election.
There are currently a number of Republican bills at both the federal and state level aimed at stopping Big Tech censorship.
A recent study found that Google’s Gmail, the most-used desktop email client in the world, overwhelmingly sent emails from conservatives to “spam” folders at the height of the 2020 election campaign season.
The study, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science and released in April 2022, revealed that in the five-month period from July to the end of November 2020, Google marked 59.3% more emails from conservative candidates as spam than those sent by Democratic candidates.
Even “Big Telecom” appears to be censoring conservative speech. Breitbart reported in June that 70% of GOP text messages go straight to spam folders compared to just eight percent of Democratic messages.
Ballotpedia released a list of elected officials, including former President Donald Trump, who have had their accounts suspended by Facebook, Twitter, and/or YouTube during their tenure in office. As of Aug. 15, all of them are Republicans.
“The federal government’s ongoing efforts to pressure private companies to censor speech that it disagrees with is alarming and an affront to the First Amendment,” the GOP House members wrote in a letter to Biden last July.
“It is the type of behavior we would expect from a Cuban dictator, not a President of the United States,” the lawmakers added.
On Wednesday, President Biden announced the cancellation of up to $20,000 of student loan debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 annually. He also extended the pause on federal student loan payments through the end of the year. Biden called the $300 billion bail-out an “economically responsible course.” Critics, including some Democrats, say the move is fiscally irresponsible and will worsen inflation.
“Wasn’t it only last week that Democrats were touting something called the Inflation Reduction Act? So much for that,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote Wednesday. “The President’s student-loan write-off is an abuse of power that favors college grads at the expense of plumbers and FedEx drivers.”
Former Barack Obama economic adviser Jason Furman slammed the student loan handout as “reckless” government overreach and said it will only worsen inflation.
“Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless,” Furman tweeted Wednesday “Doing it while going well beyond one campaign promise and breaking another is even worse.”
“Let’s be clear: This isn’t imaginary money. Biden just shifted all that student loan debt onto other taxpayers who are already dealing with high inflation,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in a tweet. “Debt ‘forgiveness’ is just another liberal scam for the elites paid for by working-class Americans.”
Scalise’s remarks mirror those of several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who say that the loan bailout places an unfair burden on struggling American taxpayers, the majority of whom did not or could not attend college.
Who will ultimately pay the price of Joe Biden’s student loan handout?
The 87% of Americans who don’t have student loans!
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 24, 2022
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled no punches in his written statement.
President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt. This policy is astonishingly unfair.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), one of several vulnerable Democrats who have spoken out against the measure, said Biden’s plan fails to include a proposal to pay for the $300 billion bailout and will do little to help borrowers in the future.
“In my view, the administration should have further targeted the relief and proposed a way to pay for this plan,” Bennet said. “While immediate relief to families is important, one-time debt cancellation does not solve the underlying problem.”
As Biden stepped down from the podium following his announcement of the loan forgiveness plan, a reporter asked the president if he thought the measure was unfair towards “people who paid their student loans or chose not to take out loans.”
Biden attempted to use misdirection, a tactic better employed by people capable of more swiftness of thought and movement than the 79-year-old president, to avoid answering the question.
“Is it fair to people who, in fact, do not own multi-billion-dollar businesses if they see one of these guys getting all the tax breaks? Is that fair?” Biden said. “What do you think?”
Reporter: ‘Is this [debt relief] unfair to people who paid their student loans?’
Pres. Biden: ‘Is it fair to people who … do not own multi-million-dollar businesses … [to] give them all these tax breaks? What do you think?’ pic.twitter.com/TJXdhpJptW
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) August 24, 2022