By Jonathan Tobin
(AUGUST 9, 2021 / JNS) Americans woke up to a new reality last month when the Biden administration revealed that it was "flagging" social media posts that it wanted Facebook to censor. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the motive for this unprecedented move was to combat "misinformation" about COVID-19. But after a year in which Silicon Valley oligarchs worked with mainstream media allies to silence legitimate news stories, such as the New York Post's reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop that put their preferred presidential candidate in an unflattering light, the notion that the government is pushing the owners of the world's information superhighway to engage in more censorship is hardly surprising.
It turns out that Biden and his Silicon Valley allies aren't the only ones trying to play "Big Brother" in the name of suppressing what they claim are bad actors. The Anti-Defamation League is using its standing as an authority on hate to try to shut down speech they deem to be unworthy of protection. The group, which has transitioned from being the apolitical defender of the Jewish community to a partisan outfit allied to the "progressive" movement, is working with some of the same Big Tech oligarchs to engage in an even more sophisticated form of censorship.
The ADL has been tapped by PayPal to define criteria that will allow that giant payment system to prevent any group it labels "extremist" from making use of its services. In an earlier era when the ADL was a trusted watchdog that stuck to its task of monitoring and speaking out against anti-Semitism, such a move might have inspired confidence in the company's decisions. But the ADL's actions in recent years under the leadership of Obama administration veteran Jonathan Greenblatt have made clear that it can't be trusted with this kind of power. Even worse, by acting as a willing accomplice to what seems to be the latest episode in an ongoing corporate assault on free expression, it is ironically becoming one of the chief enablers of those undermining the democratic values it claims to be defending.
Evidence of the ADL's bad judgment came earlier this year.
Flying beneath the radar was an effort by ADL in association with Google and a British tech company called Moonshot CVE to "redirect" users from sites that promote what they considered to be "violent extremism" via pop-up ads to those that would supposedly expose and debunk the haters. Like Big Tech's successful efforts to protect Joe Biden during the presidential campaign, this one has led not just to abuse and questions about its methods but also suspicions about the real motive behind the project.
