Amazon and Government Book Censorship

​“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of Amazon?” Andrew Slavitt, a former White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, wrote in an email on March 2, 2021.
 
Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday released this missive along with a mass of subpoenaed material in his investigation of what was clearly government intervention to censor books. Slavitt’s email was the beginning of a White House effort to pressure Amazon into pulling or depressing the visibility of books that conflicted with the scientific orthodoxy on the safety of vaccines and COVID-19 related policies.
 
Amazon initially resisted, but not on free speech grounds. An Amazon executive in an internal email revealed by Jordan declared: “We will not be doing a manual intervention today.” The reason? The “team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible” and such censorship would rile conservatives, prompting Amazon to get “the Fox News treatment.”
 
You might regard vaccine skepticism as the equivalent of a flat-Earth, antiscientific conspiracy theory. On the other hand, Richard Epstein – legal scholar and erudite public intellectual – argued that lockdowns were doing more harm than good, and that there are valid reasons to question the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Many scientists and writers have piled on Epstein’s theories as riddled with errors, to which Epstein has responded. We have seen time and again in science and policy that today’s outlandish idea could become tomorrow’s orthodoxy. Or not. The question for now is – are we better off suppressing a debate of urgent personal as well as public interest? Or should we let the science and public policy get sorted out in open debate?
 
Such questions once did not need to be asked. In recent years, the value of the First Amendment has gotten lost in the weeds, especially among people with outstanding educations from elite institutions (Andrew Slavitt: University of Pennsylvania and Harvard) which, somehow, are failing to impart the basics most Americans were once taught in high school civics.
 
To be clear, on First Amendment grounds, Amazon has every right to choose and reject books in its portfolio. If a certain author named Humbert Humbert submitted a book entitled, “How to Seduce Fourteen-Year-Old Girls,” Amazon would be well within its rights to decline it (not to mention call the police). But Amazon is a special company with a special responsibility to the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment.
 
Consider: Amazon sells 300 million print books a year. It is responsible for more than one-half of the sales of the Big Five publishers and controls up to 80 percent of the book distribution in the United States. When Amazon disallows or suppresses the sale of a book, it effectively kills it. One would expect Amazon to give maximum room for unpopular or iconoclastic ideas, whatever the PR or political consequences.
 
Most important of all, the First Amendment applies to government action. Pressure from the White House ultimately succeeded in persuading Amazon to issue a “Do Not Promote” order for books skeptical about vaccines. That is government censorship, directly forbidden by the First Amendment.
 
The urge to stop people one believes are clearly wrong, with public policy prescriptions that are dangerous, is a temptation that merely compounds the danger. Conservatives regard progressive ideas as dangerous, and liberals see conservatives as the dangerous ones. Neither side can be trusted with the power to censor the other. Nor can government be trusted to treat ideas as a regulated industry. Credit goes to Chairman Jordan for revealing this official act of censorship.