CNN host Dana Bash provided an “important fact check” to defend President Joe Biden’s administration’s alleged censorship of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has accused the Biden administration of censoring his speech soon after taking office, as his accounts were suspended on Instagram and Facebook in early 2021. Bash specified that Biden did not personally seek to censor him and that the suppression of Kennedy’s speech was due to the administration’s efforts to influence social media to remove COVID-19 content it believed to be untrue. (RELATED: YouTube Censors Presidential Candidate RFK Jr Interview With Jordan Peterson)
“Let‘s just be very clear,” Bash said. “This is an important fact check. Joe Biden wasn’t setting out to censor Kennedy’s speech or his political critics. His administration was encouraging social media sites to monitor and take down false information about the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no evidence that Biden himself was involved.”
WATCH:
Bash played a clip from a Monday evening CNN interview where Kennedy called out the Biden administration for alleged censorship.
“With 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me,” he said in the interview. “No president of the country has ever done that. The greatest threat in democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States that will use the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, to open a portal and give the access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, the CISA, the NIH, to censor his political critics.”
Kennedy was campaigning against Biden for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, but is now running as an independent candidate. The presidential candidate in March chose Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his 2024 running mate, asserting she holds his beliefs on health, censorship and immigration.
Kennedy floated in July the possibility of establishing a government-run social media platform during an interview with comedian Russell Brand.
“If the government has to start its own [platform] under some rubric that is guaranteed to be free of censorship, then I will do that,” Kennedy said.
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