That is a question clients might want to ask after BlackRock cast its shareholder votes against a proposal designed to ensure transparency in how Big Tech platforms respond to government demands for censorship.

The proposal was sponsored by the National Legal and Policy Center, which I chair. As a shareholder in Alphabet, the parent of Google, we asked the company to provide a report, updated semi-annually and published on its website, that would disclose requests from “the Executive Office of the President, Centers for Disease Control, or any other agency or entity of the United States Government” to remove or take down material from its platforms.

The resolution was a response to widespread concerns that the Biden administration is suborning censorship by major social media platforms. This would be a clear violation of a 1963 Supreme Court ruling, in Bantam Books, Inc. vs. Sullivan, prohibiting private entities from engaging in suppression of speech at the behest of government—which, the Court held, has the same effect as direct government censorship.

The proposal lost badly after the unsurprising opposition of Alphabet’s management, but also because big investment firms—most prominently BlackRock—voted against it. Events since the June 1 shareholders’ meeting, however, make BlackRock’s “no” vote look much worse.

Discovery in a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration revealed an even more far-reaching regime of censorship than was previously known. As detailed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a co-plaintiff in the suit, “an army of federal censorship bureaucrats…across at least eleven federal agencies” was mobilized and “exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies.”

And then Twitter rescinded its “permanent” suspension of vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, acknowledging that his tweets “should not have led” to a suspension. Several Twitter employees tied the suspension to White House pressure. Berenson was initially suspended just hours after President Biden’s inflammatory statement that social media outlets are “killing people” by not removing what his administration determines is “misinformation.”

On September 16, a more fundamental blow came against the companies’ assertion that as private entities they have a constitutional right to censor. Although the decision did not directly address government-requested censorship, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law prohibiting viewpoint discrimination by social media platforms, possibly setting up a Supreme Court review. The court called the companies’ position “a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment.”

The Biden administration’s censorship push is particularly ironic, given that the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health regularly transmitted disinformation regarding COVID—obscuring its origins, pushing shutdowns despite their destructive effects, and ignoring evidence about the ineffectiveness of masking. The president himself wrongly claimed that you cannot get COVID if you’ve been vaccinated, and that COVID is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

We expected Alphabet, whose platforms have willingly cooperated with the administration’s censorship demands, to oppose transparency initiatives that would expose its complicity.

But why would BlackRock, which had no role in this illegal censorship, help cover it up? Why would BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, who has become enormously wealthy under America’s system of freedom and the rule of law, now vote to undermine the bedrock right to free speech and support violations of the law by a presidential administration?

Peter Flaherty is Chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.