August 27, 2024: Zuckerberg Admits Pressure from Biden Admin to Censor Content, DNC Sues Georgia Election Board Over New Election Rules, Jack Smith Appeals Trump Classified Docs Dismissal, and More.
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Welcome back to Unbiased. Today is Tuesday, August 27th. This is your daily news rundown. And we're just going to get right into today's stories. Starting with a story from yesterday afternoon, which is that Jack Smith appealed Florida Judge Eileen Cannon's ruling dismissing Trump's classified documents case.

Here's what you need to know. This was the case that was brought against Trump for his possession and retention of classified documents. You probably remember those documents were found at Mar-a-Lago. After those charges were brought, Trump successfully got the charges dropped and

by arguing that Jack Smith had no authority to prosecute him. And I've talked about this before, but just to recap briefly so we're all on the same page, the judge ruled that under the Constitution, Congress has to specifically grant authority to attorneys general for them to be able to appoint special counsels. And Congress had done no such thing, which meant that the attorney general that appointed Jack Smith, which is Merrick B.

Garland had no authority to do so. And therefore any charges brought by Jack Smith were void. Notably, this was a one-off decision, meaning no other courts have ruled this way and interpreted the constitution in the, in the manner that judge Cannon did. Consequently, Smith appealed it. He has now appealed it to the 11th circuit court of appeals, which is the appellate court that has jurisdiction over Florida courts.

On appeal, Smith is asking the 11th Circuit panel to reverse Judge Cannon's order of dismissal and send it back to Judge Cannon for further proceedings. In other words, to let this case actually play out. So it'll now be up to the 11th Circuit to render a decision as to whether Smith had the lawful authority to prosecute Trump. And from there, the losing party could then appeal it further.

Moving on to some other news, Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman and CEO of Meta, said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that his teams were, quote unquote, pressured by the Biden administration to censor pandemic-related content.

Now, first and foremost, before we get into the details of this story, before I read you the letter, I just want to say this is something we already knew. But the reason that it's making news is because Zuckerberg himself is coming out and saying we were pressured. We shouldn't have listened. I regret it, et cetera, et cetera. What we knew previously is that the Biden administration worked with various social media platforms, most notably Meta, to suppress certain types of content, not just pandemic related content, but also negative content surrounding the Biden family.

And we know this because there was a case in front of the Supreme Court just a few months ago called Murthy v. Missouri. And through that lawsuit, we found out that the administration was working hand-in-hand with these platforms to restrict, suppress, moderate, whatever you want to call it, certain types of content. Now, the question in that case for the justices was,

Is the federal government allowed to do this or is it a violation of, you know, our First Amendment rights as American citizens? The justices, though, didn't answer the question because they actually dismissed the lawsuit. They held that the plaintiffs that brought the suit, which were two states and five social media users, didn't establish a legal right to sue, which is something we call standing. However, all of this to say, through that lawsuit, we knew the Biden administration often pressured social media platforms to suppress unwanted content.

But yesterday's letter from Zuckerberg was a response to the House Judiciary Committee's investigation into this relationship between the Biden administration and social media platforms. So Zuckerberg wrote the following, quote,

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we made our own decision, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.

I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that with the benefit of hindsight and new information we wouldn't make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to the pressure from any administration in either direction, and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again." End quote.

The letter then continues, and it reads, quote, in a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.

That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story.

We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again. For instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the United States while waiting for fact checkers, end quote. He concluded the letter by addressing a contribution he made during the 2020 election to ensure local election jurisdictions had the resources that they needed to help people vote safely during the pandemic.

And he noted that while that contribution was designed to be non-partisan, and despite analyses showing that they were, he knows some people believe the contribution benefited one party over another, and therefore in an effort to remain neutral, he does not plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

So again, we didn't really learn anything new as far as the administration pressuring Meta to censor certain types of content, but we did learn through this letter that this is something Zuckerberg regrets, that Meta did in fact suppress the story about Burisma as an example, and that Meta has since updated its policies and procedures to avoid suppression of stories like those.

Moving on to a lawsuit. The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party of Georgia, and nine individuals filed a lawsuit against the Georgia State Election Board yesterday over new election rules. Let's talk about it. The Georgia State Election Board, which is made up of three Republicans and two Democrats, passed two new rules recently that the Democratic Party and other plaintiffs say should be struck down.

The first rule says that state election officials must conduct a reasonable inquiry prior to election certification.

The second rule says that election officials must allow individual county board members to, quote, "...examine all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections." End quote. In other words, under the new rules, the election officials in Georgia are required to conduct an inquiry before certifying election results and permit members of county election boards to investigate ballot counts and other documentation while the election is ongoing. End quote.

As we know, Trump lost in Georgia by about 11,000 votes in 2020. And Georgia indicted Trump and other co-defendants in the wake of the election. So Georgia has become a state very much at the center of this election.

The plaintiffs say that these new rules are an attempt to, quote, end the required process for certifying election results and have, quote, turn the straightforward and mandatory act of certification into a broad license for individual board members to hunt for purported election irregularities of any kind, end quote. Now, the plaintiff's argument, quote,

really boils down to these new rules conflicting with existing state law. So under current Georgia law, when the polls close, the poll manager extracts the election results from each electronic voting unit. The manager then verifies the number of ballots cast

you know, matches the public count number on the unit, transmits the election results via modem to the central tabulating center of the county, and completes and signs this ballot recap form, which shows the number of valid ballots, the number of spoiled and invalid ballots, the number of provisional ballots, and the number of unused ballots.

The manager also collects the memory cards from these voting units and the results tapes, seals them in an envelope, signs it, and sends it to the certifying election official. These officials are called superintendents. The superintendent verifies the signature on each envelope, breaks the seal, removes the content, downloads the results on the memory card into the election management system to obtain results for certification, and at that point, it's certified.

According to state law, these election returns are to be certified by the superintendent no later than 5 p.m. on the Monday after the date the election was held. Georgia law also sets forth the grounds for contesting the election. When a candidate, you know, wants to contest, they can do so via these ways online.

under Georgia law. So what the plaintiffs are arguing is one, state law already sets forth the process for how elections are to be handled and that if a candidate wants to contest results, they can do that, but not by delaying certification like this new rule says. And two, that certification of the election is a mandatory duty under existing state law and therefore the Georgia State Election Board cannot implement these new rules that make certification in effect a

discretionary. So that's the plaintiff's argument. And while it's only been a day since this lawsuit was filed, so we don't have a response from the Georgia State Election Board, we can imagine the counter argument is going to be just the opposite, right? That these new laws do not conflict with existing state law.

So we'll see what happens with this. Obviously, a judge is going to have to act relatively quickly given the impending election, but we'll see. As far as relief goes, the plaintiffs are asking the judge to enter a permanent injunction, which would prohibit

the election board from enforcing these new rules and also asking the court to declare that existing state law is the law and that these new rules must be construed consistent with state law. Otherwise, it's an unlawful exercise of the board's authority.

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Wednesday morning at 3.28 a.m. Eastern Time, a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. And the interesting part about this is the rocket is bringing four people to space for the first ever commercial spacewalk. There will be two other opportunities to launch between 5.23 a.m. and 7.09 a.m., and if needed, the launch will be pushed to Thursday morning.

This mission aims to accomplish not only the first ever commercial spacewalk, but also testing in-space communications, reaching a higher altitude than the International Space Station, and conducting research about the impacts of long-term space flights on human health. This entire trip is slated to take six days and reach 870 miles above the Earth, which is the furthest humans have traveled from the Earth since Apollo 17 went to the moon in 1972.

So about an hour after liftoff, the crew will start decompression protocol for the spacewalk. This will last about three days. On day three, two of the crew will embark on a tethered spacewalk, which is expected to last 15 to 20 minutes. On

On day four, the crew will test space lasers for communication purposes and attempt to connect the capsule with Starlink satellites and beam a signal back to the Earth using lasers instead of radios. Then on day five, the crew will travel back down. And on day six, the capsule is scheduled to land in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida.

Those aboard include a tech entrepreneur, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force fighter pilot. And for those interested, there will be a live webcast starting roughly three and a half hours before liftoff, which you can either watch on SpaceX's website or SpaceX's X accounts.

Moving on to quick hitters. There is a bit of a dispute happening over the upcoming debate between Vice President Harris and former President Trump, and that dispute is over microphones. So in the last debate between President Biden and Trump, Biden's team won the implementation of this rule that ensured a candidate's microphones were muted when it wasn't their turn to speak. But now Harris's team actually wants that rule reversed, and Trump's team wants to keep it.

Notably, when Trump himself was asked about the mics while at an event in Virginia on Monday, he said, quote, doesn't matter to me. I'd rather have it probably on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn't like it the last time, but it worked out fine. And I think it should be the same, end quote. So time will tell what ABC News decides to do about the mics on September 10th. But hopefully this dispute doesn't get in the way of the debate actually taking place.

In an update to yesterday's episode, RFK Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson, which aired Monday, that he's been asked to serve on Trump's transition team. Trump's campaign confirmed this today. Now, this isn't much of a surprise considering what we know from Kennedy's announcement to suspend his campaign. But he said in the interview with Carlson in part, quote, I'm working with the campaign. We're working on policy issues together. I've been asked to go on the transition team.

and to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I'm looking forward to that." And I do have that full interview linked for you in the sources if you're interested.

On a related note, Tulsi Gabbard has also been added to Trump's transition team. A senior advisor on Trump's team said today, quote,

Now, if Tulsi Gabbard's name sounds familiar, it may be because she was previously a Democratic representative in Congress, the vice chairwoman on the Democratic National Committee, and then actually ran as a Democratic presidential candidate.

presidential candidate in 2020. She ended up leaving the Democratic Party in 2022. But you may also recognize her name from a recent story on the podcast about her appearing on the TSA watch list after she says she criticized the Biden administration.

A judge in San Francisco dismissed for the second time a lawsuit against X, claiming that when Musk took over the company, it targeted female employees for layoffs. The judge originally dismissed the suit back in May. I talked about it then. The dismissal was because the

plaintiffs had failed to allege a plausible claim, but the judge gave the plaintiffs three weeks to amend their lawsuit and include more detail. The plaintiffs filed an amended version, but again, the judge said that the lawsuit specifically lacked sufficient detail about why the plaintiffs left the company, and even if the plaintiffs were subjected to layoffs like they claimed, the plaintiffs had not alleged that their sex was a motivating factor.

And finally, let's finish with some critical thinking. I like to keep these critical thinking segments related to a story included in each episode. So let's talk about the relationship between social media platforms and the federal government.

I know yesterday's critical thinking segment was similar. It also had to do with, you know, social media and content moderation. But today's questions are slightly different in that they pertain more to the federal government rather than executives of a particular platform. We're also not talking about criminal liability today.

just sort of, you know, more general questions. So in thinking about today's questions, we obviously have to keep in mind that the First Amendment protects us from government censorship. Remember, though, the First Amendment does not prevent private entities like social media platforms from censoring and restricting our speech, right? Private entities make their own rules. What the First Amendment does do is it prevents and prohibits the government from restricting or censoring speech.

So I want you to think about instances in which you would be okay with the government working with private social media platforms to restrict speech. And maybe you're not okay with it at all, but if that's the case, I really want you to challenge yourself to think about instances in which you would be okay with it and vice versa. If you think that the government should be able to work with private social media platforms

private entities, whatever it might be, to censor speech in whatever capacity that the government feels it's warranted, challenge yourself to think of instances in which you wouldn't be okay with it. And relatedly, at what point do you believe the government's communication with these platforms crosses the First Amendment threshold? Is it any communication whatsoever? Is it persuasion, which is a little more

Is it coercion, which is even more than persuasion? Where does that line get drawn for you? And in thinking about this too, obviously the situation before us is the Biden administration seeking suppression of unwanted content, whether it's pandemic related content or family related content. But what if it was the Trump administration that sought suppression of unwanted content? What if hypothetically Trump is elected again and we learn that Trump

worked with social media platforms to suppress unwanted content? Would your answers change? Because it's always important for us to think about these sorts of things by asking ourselves the necessary questions to sort of challenge our beliefs at their core. When we're asking ourselves these questions on one side of the aisle and the answer may come easy, we then have to ask ourselves the same question, but on the other side. That's where the challenge really comes in.

That is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. As always, have a fantastic night and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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