Mike Lee: WH Flagging Misinformation on Social Media Looks ‘an Awful Lot Like a First Amendment Violation’

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on Friday reacted to White House press secretary Jen Psaki revealing the President Joe Biden administration is working with Facebook to flag what it deems misinformation regarding the coronavirus and vaccines.

Lee emphasized that the government does not have the right to censor speech. He added the effort by the White House looks “an awful lot like a First Amendment violation.”

“[L]ook, the government can’t censor speech. The First Amendment makes that very clear,” Lee outlined on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom.” “A private, for-profit corporation can make its own decisions, but when it’s doing that in collusion with government, it starts to look to me an awful lot like a First Amendment violation. In any event, what we’ve seen is social media platforms and search engines on occasion — on many, many occasions of late — promising to be even-handed, portraying themselves to their users and to the public as even-handed when they are anything but that. And the American people aren’t going to tolerate that much longer.”

Host Bill Hemmer noted all of the stories big tech companies have attempted to censor in the last year.

“What do those things have in common? What do all of them that they take down have in common? They are all messages that are deemed to be associated in one way or another with the right and not the left. You do not find instances of this happening for messages on the left. And the reason for that is pretty darn obvious,” Lee replied.

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent