I’ve recently posted twice on the case of Missouri v. Biden, in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana — along with four private plaintiffs (Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, the non-profit Health Freedom Louisiana, and yours truly) represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance — are suing the Biden Administration for alleged free speech violations. Specifically, the executive branch of the federal government has been colluding with social media to censor any content on social media platforms — Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google), and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft), Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) — any content that questions, challenges, or contradicts the government’s covid policies.
While private companies might arguably choose to censor content on their platforms, the government cannot pressure or coerce private companies to censor disfavored content. Any such action is clearly a violation of the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. As we articulate in our latest legal brief: “Under the First Amendment, the federal Government should have no role in policing private speech or picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is what federal officials are doing, on a massive scale.”
Our joint statement on discovery disputes legal brief, filed with the court and made public today, reveals scores of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful. Here are just a few excerpts from this document, which includes attachments of hundreds of pages of emails and other governmental and Big Tech internal communications as supporting evidence. These documents were obtained after we requested the following information on discovery:
Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests upon the Government Defendants seeking the identity of federal officials who have been and are communicating with social-media platforms about disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and/or any censorship or suppression of speech on social media, including the nature and content of those communications. Plaintiffs also served third-party subpoenas on five major social-media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta), YouTube, and LinkedIn. On August 17, 2022, the Government Defendants provided objections and responses to the Plaintiff States’ discovery requests, and began a rolling production of documents that was completed on August 26, 2022.
Read full article and view documents here:
brownstone.org/articles/uncovering-the-army-of-federal-censors/