It is? Only if one expected the mainstream media to cover sotto voce government censorship of Americans on social media platforms, as our friends at Chicks on the Right point out.

Podcasting king Joe Rogan seems shocked at the media silence on the Twitter Files, however. “You see no coverage of this on CNN,” Rogan declares, “no coverage of this astounding collusion between intelligence agencies and a social media network to suppress accurate information that would harm the political party that’s in power, which is f*****g wild.”

It’s f*****g expected, but listen to both clips, courtesy of The Vigilant Fox. The first is from yesterday’s show, and the second is a clip from last August in which Mark Zuckerberg attempts to minimize their censorship based on FBI requests:

Facebook Decided to Derank and Suppress the Hunter Laptop Story After Being Approached by the FBI

Mark Zuckerberg (8/25/22): "If the FBI … come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously." pic.twitter.com/oVZqRLGhAU

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) February 8, 2023

“It’s wild that the news isn’t covering this,” Rogan continues, “because arguably, that’s as big a scandal as Watergate. It’s as big a scandal as any other. In the past where we’ve found that there’s been some really shady going on, that would change the way people would see a narrative.”

Perhaps that’s the reason why the mainstream media won’t cover the Twitter Files. They don’t want to inform people and risk the way that people see their narratives about “misinformation,” public debate, and government encroachment into free speech and First Amendment violations. Those violations have, for the most part, damaged the media industry’s critics and political opponents — and they want that to continue.

The only real surprise here is that Rogan’s surprised. After his battles with the mainstream media over the content of his podcasts, one might have thought he’d expect this as much as those of us who track media performance did. Even Matt Taibbi expressed some surprise at the vast avalanche of disinterest from the Fourth Estate, given their supposed role in democracy to expose abuses of power. Government agencies leaning on Twitter and Facebook to silence Americans based on viewpoint is an affront to the Constitution, and Taibbi has the receipts — only no one from establishment media cares.

At least when Democrats do it.

No one has seen Facebook’s files yet, at least not in terms of the FBI and DHS. Thanks to an unrelated lawsuit, we have seen how the CDC dictated terms to Facebook regarding online discussion of COVID-19, vaccines, and therapeutics. Meta outsourced that effort to the CDC and implemented their demands:

The messages reveal an environment where the CDC kept tabs on Meta’s moderation practices and regularly told the company what the agency wanted it to do.

For instance, in May 2021, CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate. …

Facebook’s moderator notes that some of the above claims “would already be violating”—an implicit admission that the CDC’s opinion on the other claims would be a deciding factor in whether the platform would restrict such content. Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process; moderators repeatedly thanked the CDC for its “help in debunking.”

That seems to run counter to Zuckerberg’s claims in this clip, in which he insisted that Facebook only dialed down the visibility of such debates, and only used the CDC as a reference:

So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that. What we do is we have if something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation. We also [used] this 3rd party fact checking program because we don t want to be deciding what s true and false.

And for the, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false. The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it, so you could still share it, you could still consume it. We say the distribution has decreased, [but] it got shared.

Zuckerberg didn’t mainly rely on his own resources and a “third party fact checking program.” He allowed the federal government to censor speech and debate on his platform.

So what’s next? Chicks on the Right’s Daisy is waiting for the next shoe to drop, and it’s an Italian loafer:

I, for one, can’t wait for the Fauci Twitter files. I’ve been waiting very, VERY patiently for those. One can assume they were just so plentiful and juicy that it’s taking the journalist(s) so long to sift through them. But when we finally get to see them? They’ll be chock-full of robust, shocking, narrative-changing information – that the media will promptly ignore, of course. Again.

Indeed. Don’t be surprised when it happens, either.

Update: Actually, two of them. Apparently Rogan also made an arguably anti-Semitic remark about Jews being “into money,” and although I’ve seen the video, I haven’t gotten an embeddable version of it. I’m also not sure when it was said, but it appears recent and connected to Ilhan Omar’s removal from the Foreign Affairs committee. Lidblog’s Jeff Dunetz may have more on that later, but he has this post up explaining why Omar’s remarks were classically anti-Semitic.

Second: Rolling Stone reported today that Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress also made demands for content takedowns. It’s paywalled, but here are the tweets for the story:

But former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to. https://t.co/xTemXlDLww pic.twitter.com/MANhBqSe7q

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 8, 2023

If true, that’s also an abuse of power and should get exposed by Congress. However, it’s also different in degree when politicians complain (such as Adam Schiff did) than when law enforcement agencies attempt to intrude on speech and dissent. House Republicans had better be prepared to delve into those areas too, if they want to maintain credibility … assuming the Rolling Stone report is accurate. Their track record on reliability has been less than stellar.

Update: Jeff just sent me the embeddable video:

By the way, Americans are into pizza. Italians mainly developed their interest from Americans, not the other way around. And for that matter, Americans are into money, too.