Biden Stalks Twitter, Ignores Apple
The White House has no good explanation for why it’s targeting Twitter and giving a pass to the speech suppressors at Apple.
The MAGA Democrats — those who worship the leftism and the speech-suppressing authoritarianism of Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple — were no doubt overjoyed Monday when Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, assured the White House press corps that the administration would be “keeping a close eye” on Twitter.
The rest of us, though, saw Jean-Pierre’s remark for what it was: another ignorant utterance from an out-of-control regime.
“This is something that we’re certainly keeping an eye on,” Jean-Pierre said in response to a softball from a Reuters toady about Twitter having become a “vector of misinformation.” She continued: “Look, we have always been very clear that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation, when it comes to the hate that we’re seeing, that they take action, that they continue to take action. Again, we’re all keeping a close eye on this.”
A reporter asks Karine Jean-Pierre about “ensuring that Twitter does not become a vector of misinformation”:
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 28, 2022
“We are all keeping a close eye on this, we are all monitoring what’s currently occurring.” pic.twitter.com/ZOEiDzTwnj
Of course, any talk of “disinformation” by the Biden White House must be taken with a grain block of salt. We remember the lies about not having a COVID vaccine when he took office, about his non-involvement in Hunter’s business schemes, about that laptop being Russian disinformation, about inflation being “transitory,” about inflation being “zero” in July, about his $3.5 trillion spending bill having a “zero price tag,” about “Putin’s price hike,” about gas having been “over $5” when he took office, about having inherited a broken economy, about the illegal immigration crisis being “seasonal,” about our border patrol agents “whipping” Haitian illegals, about voting reform laws being “Jim Crow 2.0.”
We could go on. And on. Suffice it to say that Team Biden has no business monitoring anyone’s speech for truthiness. Nor does any government entity.
We suspect constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro agrees. “That statement,” said Shapiro, who’s the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, “sounds ominous and is likely a First Amendment violation in and of itself.”
Incidentally, when last we checked, Biden had yet to take down his official Twitter account — which seems odd, given the grave threat the platform poses as a “vector of misinformation.”
Now then, let’s contrast this White House’s laser-focus on Twitter with its laissez-faire attitude toward Apple’s speech-suppressing collaboration with genocidal communist China. As we noted two days ago:
With protests spreading across China over Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID strategy, Apple has restricted the use of AirDrop on iPhones and Apple devices in the country. Protesters use AirDrop to bypass the communist regime’s censorship of the internet and communicate directly with other protesters by “forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate,” according to Quartz.
We further noted that Apple carried out this restriction via a surreptitious “update” to its phones in mainland China: Its release notes didn’t even mention this change, instead only listing “bug fixes and security updates.”
So Apple tricked the Chinese people into downgrading their iPhones’ capabilities, all to appease their thuggish communist masters.
Team Biden’s response? Nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds.
Fox News’s Martha MacCallum took White House spokesman John Kirby to the woodshed on its double standard between Twitter and Apple.
This might be the hardest moment ever broadcast LIVE on Fox News as John Kirby attends his own flogging over Regime’s explicit targeting of Twitter and @elonmusk while allowing Apple to trample Free Speech and collude with CCP
— Danny De Urbina (@dannydeurbina) November 30, 2022
Just Watch This.
All the way to the end. pic.twitter.com/szDBof2CBb
When challenged by MacCallum about stalking Twitter but not Apple, Kirby said, “Apple is a private company. They have to make decisions, and they have to speak for those decisions.”
To which MacCallum pointed out, “Twitter is a private company too. So why is Twitter getting one treatment [and] Apple’s getting another?”
The question stumped the normally smooth and smarmy Kirby. All he could blurt out was that they were “completely two different circumstances.”
Faring no better than Kirby was Apple CEO Tim Cook, if we’re to glean anything from his brief “conversation” with journalist Hillary Vaughn this week on Capitol Hill.
As National Review summarizes: “Fox Business’s Hillary Vaughn asked Cook if he supports the Chinese people’s right to protest and if he has any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting Covid lockdowns. Cook, who was on Capitol Hill Thursday to meet with lawmakers, did not respond.”
Nor did he utter a peep when Vaughn asked him whether he “regrets restricting airdrop access that protesters used to evade surveillance from the Chinese government” and if he believes it is “problematic” to do business with the Chinese Community Party when they “suppress human rights.”
We can’t figure out who looks worse: speech-suppressing Joe Biden or speech-suppressing Tim Cook.
