Reporters Rush to Defend White House After Peter Doocy Calls ‘Misinformation Flagging’ Campaign ‘Spying’
As per the norm, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy nailed the Biden White House Friday after their Thursday announcement about how they were “flagging problematic [COVID] posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
During the heated exchange, which took place during the Friday press briefing, Doocy referred to what the administration was doing as “spying,” which Psaki took issue with.
Psaki responded to Doocy’s pointed questioning by saying in so many words that it couldn’t be “spying” because it was publicly available information. She also drew equivalencies between the White House’s interactions with the press corps and their communications with Big Tech entities, apparently hoping people don’t understand that there is a difference between the White House being obligated to communicate with the press corps versus them trawling the social media accounts of private citizens for alleged misinformation to report to said social media platforms.
Doocy tripped her up throughout the exchange, basically getting her to admit that the Biden administration’s position on working with social media companies in a Big Brother-type capacity to censor private citizens was only being done in an effort to save lives.
For those who missed it, watch their back and forth below:
Not surprisingly, the big story for the Democrat apologists at “news” outlets like the Washington Post and CNN was not how Psaki was trying to justify the administration being in regular contact with Facebook concerning the posts of private citizens but the fact that Doocy dared to call it for what it was:
Here’s how CNN’s Jake Tapper described Doocy’s questioning of Psaki:
“At the same briefing, somebody from Fox, which also has a lot of people on who say things about the vaccine that are not true, asked a question premised on a lie, which was that the White House was going through people’s Facebook pages and private information to come up with this list. It’s not true. But, once again, we see another example of just lies making their way into the airwaves. But, again, that Fox correspondent has every right to lie or be mistaken about this.”
Tapper’s comments start at about the 4:45 mark of the below video:
Where’s the “lie”? How is it “not spying” when the federal government goes digging for information posted by private citizens? Just because it’s doesn’t require a warrant to find out the information, does that make it any less dangerous? I think a case could be made that it’s even more dangerous because the White House is being so brazenly unapologetic about what they’re doing as if it’s perfectly normal, which also includes calling for across-the-board social media platform bans if a user has only been banned on one of them.
Let’s remember, too, that the White House attempting to work with places like Facebook to crack down on alleged “misinformation” is not a new development. In fact, though the Biden administration has admitted they have teams of people patrolling Facebook (“Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we’re flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” Psaki said Thursday), there’s also data they’ve been waiting on Facebook to provide, which means not everything they’re looking for from private citizens on Facebook is publicly available for just anyone to find:
Tapper and Blake both deservedly got blasted for their ridiculous hot takes:
The White House working with Facebook to censor content they disapprove of and also partnering with SMS carriers to flag alleged misinformation in text messages are things Republicans, Democrats, the media, and everyone in between should all be in agreement in terms of it being disturbing news.
Except in predictable fashion, the media and Democrats have drawn partisan lines in the sand and have declared that people (and reporters) who don’t appreciate the government trying to shut down voices they don’t like are the real problem. Further, not one person seems to be willing to pinpoint just who it is that gets to define what “misinformation” actually is.
Maddening.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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