House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Friday that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is "no hero" for admitting his company agreed to censor Americans at the behest of the Biden-Harris administration.
Johnson made the remarks after the Facebook founder sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee acknowledging that the White House pressured the company to suppress COVID-19-related content in 2021.
He also confessed to "demoting" a story about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election on the grounds it was potential "misinformation."
Johnson told the "Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show" that Zuckerberg "was complicit in all of this."
"He does this, you know, admission process now because he's trying to cover his own bases and their profit margins. I mean, this is a business proposition for him, which is why he participated in the first place. But we now know the facts that we have known all along."
"I mean, we've known this for more than three years, that they were manipulating, censoring, and silencing conservative viewpoints online ... and it had the desired effect. I mean, Hunter Biden's laptop was one of the things that they, they snuffed out," Johnson continued.
"And in the post-election analysis in polling, we know there's a large percentage of Democrats who say they would never have even voted for Joe Biden if they knew about the laptop and the related scandals. So we can never rewind the clock.
"We can't go back in time and undo all that."
The Louisiana Republican hailed billionaire Elon Musk for buying Twitter (now X) and his commitment to free speech, saying, "If Elon had never bought Twitter, the beginning of the revelation of all this would never have begun.
"And so, we need patriots who care about free speech to help us defend it. And I hope we'll have that in the days ahead."
Kate McManus ✉
Kate McManus is a New Jersey-based Newsmax writer who's spent more than two decades as a journalist.
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