America First Policy Institute’s Instagram page was reportedly “permanently suspended” and “scheduled for deletion” by Meta on Wednesday, Jan. 10, shortly after the organization used the platform to highlight Hunter Biden’s disregard for a congressional subpoena.
AFPI’s account was initially flagged and suspended for violating “Community Guidelines on fraud and deception.” The offending content was assumedly the post about Hunter Biden, made prior to his surprise appearance before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
The post contained objectively true statements about Hunter Biden’s defiance of House Republicans’ subpoena, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon’s convictions for ignoring similar subpoenas issued by congressional Democrats, and the Justice Department’s interference in the IRS’s investigation into Hunter’s international business dealings. There was nothing fraudulent or deceptive about it.
This post was made at 8:21 a.m, and AFPI says Meta informed the organization of its account’s suspension at 8:49 a.m. AFPI told The Federalist, however, “No communications ever mentioned what piece of content triggered this flag.”
Just minutes after AFPI appealed the account’s suspension, the organization says it received notice from Meta via email about the completion of an automated account review and “that [the] account has been deemed to violate fraud and deception standards, and [was] permanently suspended and is scheduled for deletion.” AFPI says its account received a “web notice where careful note is given to indicate this is a FINAL decision and further review is impossible.”
Shortly after AFPI CEO Brooke Rollins shared news of what had happened, online outrage and demands for accountability ensued. Legislators, conservative activists, and even presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sounded the alarm, decrying the page’s suspension as an un-American suppression of speech and an attempt by Big Tech to interfere in the 2024 election.
Later that afternoon, AFPI says it was informed by Meta that access to its Instagram account was restored and that the page’s content had not violated “fraud and deception” standards. AFPI leadership told The Federalist that a Meta representative further relayed to the group that a “bug in the system” had set the whole ordeal in motion.
But where some see bugs, others see features.
After all, there’s a chance an error actually did occur. Without seeing Instagram’s back end prior to any hypothetical remedy being administered, the only recourse, generally speaking, is to take Meta at its word. But as Rollins told The Federalist, “The bugs in the system always seem to affect people on our side of the aisle.”
Neither Instagram nor Meta responded to The Federalist’s requests for comment on the nature of this “bug.”
It just so happens a bug in Instagram’s system happened to flag a prominent conservative organization for “fraud and deception” after it highlighted the Biden family’s corruption and the federal government’s likely role in covering it up. When was the last time a left-wing think tank was flagged for spreading “fraud and deception” after regurgitating Russia-collusion hoax agitprop or reminding people to stand six feet apart to “stop the spread”? Never. The “bugs” only go one way.
Big Tech, being ontologically leftist, protects and emboldens Democrat politicians. This isn’t new, and obviously, Meta is no exception. The company has helped the Democrat establishment and permanent Washington prop up the Bidens time and time again.
Meta’s Facebook colluded with the FBI to suppress circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election and heeded the Biden administration’s call for a Covid censorship program targeting “Covid and vaccine misinformation” and “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe.”
One need look no further than Murthy v. Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v. Biden) to see the systemic left-wing bias of Big Tech and the shameless impunity with which the government routinely directs it to violate Americans’ free-speech rights.
In a July 2021 editorial for The Wall Street Journal discussing a class-action lawsuit filed with AFPI against Google, former President Donald Trump made the case that Democrat weaponization of Big Tech presents an existential threat to American democracy.
Trump said, “Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media — banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.”
For entirely too long, the American right bought into the myth of institutional political neutrality, believing that, among other falsehoods, the actions of specific entities were siloed within themselves and did not have spillover effects.
Big Tech is not just a conglomerate of software companies; it’s an immensely powerful political entity comprised of unaccountable individuals with vast sums of wealth and more information than all of the world’s intelligence agencies combined. It is overwhelmingly manned by rabidly secular, leftist ideologues with no national loyalty or fealty toward the religious or cultural identity of this nation. Because of its ability to control the flow of information, dictating the terms of how we participate in discourse and access news, it controls how the masses think and perceive reality. And it hates you.
But sure, there was a bug in the code of a system with more than 2 billion users, resulting in the ban of an activist page highlighting the vulnerability of an incumbent president upon whom this same monolith is dependent for survival.
This mask has been lifted, and people are now aware of the stakes. We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
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