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Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo is spinning a baseless conspiracy theory, saying that to her, “it just feels like” there is a network attached to U.S. government law enforcement agencies, along with the media, “trying to stop” Donald Trump, before she asked a sitting U.S. Senator to “stop the free press.”

Bartiromo in her Wednesday interview with U.S. Senator Rand Paul went as far as to suggest top tech firms including Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, had intentionally censored a photo of Donald Trump taken just after the assassination attempt earlier this month. Her remarks led the Kentucky Republican lawmaker to explain the First Amendment to the veteran journalist after she asked that Congress “do something” to prevent tech platforms from censoring certain posts or information.

“It just feels like there is a network in place in all these corners, whether it be government, FBI, Secret Service or media, that is trying to stop Trump,” declared Bartiromo, a staunch supporter of the ex-president.

Bartiromo, who has been called a “conspiracy theorist,” was named in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox Corp. A Washington Post 2020 profile noted she had employed “the parlance of election conspiracy theorists,” and noted that Bartiromo “was one of the few to offer her solid approval of Trump’s disastrous August 2017 news conference in which he insisted there were ‘some very fine people on both sides’ of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.”

“I mean,” Baritromo continued Tuesday, “look at, look at what Trump said about Meta and Google and, you know, go try to Google ‘Trump assassination attempt.’ President Trump said that Meta and Google are censoring information about the assassination attempt on his life, saying that they made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about the heinous act. Google responded to the allegations and claimed that its auto complete search tool was not showing results for the Trump assassination attempt.”

“It says there was no manual action taken and that its systems have protections against auto complete predictions associated with political violence. It also says that its chatbot Gemini refusing to answer questions about the assassination attempt because of a previous policy which restricted questions on election related issues.”

Bartiromo then sounded stunned that Google could deem the attempted assassination of an ex-president running for re-election, speaking to supporters at a campaign rally, “election-related.”

“Are you serious?” she asked. “This is election related? Now, an assassination attempt on a former president is election-related? Meanwhile, Meta says it’s working to update its AI assistant after it was telling users that the assassination attempt was fictional. Facebook also says that it was an error to censor the iconic photo of Trump pumping his fist in the air after getting shot. We have that photo. There it is. Why were they censoring this photo? Senator?”

Senator Paul responded, declaring, “well, well, all I can say is, thank God for Elon Musk, who exposed how terribly biased these people were. And by taking over Twitter. Twitter now is an objective platform where you can post things now.”

Maria Bartiromo, interviewing Rand Paul, claims of the Trump assassination attempt, “it just feels like there’s a network in place, in all these corners – whether it be govt, FBI, Secret Service, or media – that is trying to stop Trump.” (The shooter was a registered Republican) pic.twitter.com/lXkznkb9lX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024

Last year The Atlantic declared Twitter “is now a right-wing social network,” while Foreign Policy warned, “Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Becoming a Sewer of Disinformation.”

As the interview continued, Bartiromo appeared increasingly agitated.

“You’re an elected official. Can’t you stop the so-called free press from censoring information and do something to ensure that these companies are in fact, you know, living up to the letter of free press?”

“The First Amendment’s very clear,” Senator Paul replied, “that Congress, government shall make no law restricting freedom of press or freedom of speech. It doesn’t say that private entities, so for example, The New York Times doesn’t have to print my op-eds. Neither does The Washington Post. In fact, they really don’t ever print my opinion. And they have a right to, it’s a privately-owned newspaper. It’s the same way with social media.”

“But you can leave, and you can force them to expand their horizons if they you vote with your dollars and go somewhere else. And so this is the way the marketplace works. But if we set up a government entity to say to Google and to Facebook, ‘you have to publish this,’ my fear is that people who will populate that government entity making these speech decisions will be people who end up being people who don’t like my opinion either. I don’t want the government involved or any kind of committee involved from government with choosing and enforcing free speech, because I think they’ll just enforce it another rule on speech that I’m not particularly in favor of,” Paul explained.

“OK, well,” Bartiromo asked, “what about taking away their freedom of liability, for anything? What about that? Is there nothing you can do as an elected official to try to make sure these companies are reporting truth?”

“If you let people sue Facebook because someone said they don’t like someone else on their Facebook post, it’s going to destroy the internet. So liability protection is important for the internet to work. Look, I don’t like their left-wing politics and I oppose them, I speak out, I boycott these people, and I’ll do it to my last breath. But I don’t want the government involved with breaking up big tech. If you break up our big tech, guess who takes over” China’s big tech. So I’m not for breaking up American big tech.”

Rand Paul has to explain the 1st Amendment to Maria Bartiromo after she suggests Congress should “stop the free press from censoring information.” pic.twitter.com/BUC67Zzt0b

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024

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