JD Vance avoids January 6th questions by pivoting to Facebook ‘censorship’

A question about whether Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) would challenge the 2024 election results quickly devolved into a fight about censorship and Big Tech during the debate with Democratic candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).

“You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal,” moderator Norah O’Donnell asked Vance. “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”

Vance said that instead of the threats to democracy decried by Democrats, what’s really worrying is the threat of “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.” Vance says Harris would like to “censor people who engage in misinformation,” and that’s “a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen” in the last four or 40 years.

“Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” Vance said, adding that’s a much larger threat than former President Donald Trump telling people to protest “peacefully” on January 6th at the US Capitol insurrection. Vance compared Trump’s refusal to believe the results of the 2020 election to Democrats’ concerns about Russian foreign interference in the 2016 election, where they pointed to foreign agents’ purchasing of Facebook ads as contributing to Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. (A Republican-led Senate committee concluded in 2020 that Russia did seek to interfere in the 2016 election to benefit Trump’s candidacy.)

“January 6th was not Facebook ads,” Walz retorted, calling Vance’s version of events “revisionist history.”

Vance was apparently alluding to the events behind Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case decided earlier this year. The case covered accusations that the Biden administration coerced tech platforms to engage in censorship. Justices ruled in the Biden administration’s favor based on standing, but they also cast doubt on whether there was a meaningful connection between government outreach to platforms like Facebook and those platforms’ later moderation decisions.

Walz attempted to redirect the debate back to the original question. “Did he lose the 2020 election?” he asked Vance.

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”

“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.

“It’s a damning non-answer for you not to talk about censorship,” Vance retorted.

At another point, Vance accused Harris of wanting to “use the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds.” Trump himself recently suggested that some people “should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices,” referring to criticism of the Supreme Court.

Walz responded to Vance with the widely used but misleading claim that “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” is a Supreme Court test for unprotected speech. Vance didn’t dispute the premise, but he claimed “you guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn’t wear masks. That’s not fire in a crowded theatre. That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.”

“I don’t run Facebook,” Walz said. “This is not a debate, it’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”