Back in May, my colleague Susie Moore reported on the Attorneys General for Louisiana and Missouri filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration for working hand in glove with Big Tech behemoths like Twitter, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), and YouTube to suppress the First Amendment rights of Americans.
As she wrote:
On Thursday, the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana against numerous Biden Administration officials and agencies alleging that they colluded with social media companies to suppress and censor free speech on several topics, including Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and the Wuhan lab leak theory surrounding the origins of COVID-19.
Later in the piece, she outlined some of the provisions of the massive, 86-page Complaint, which Missiouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced and shared in a Twitter thread:
Per Schmitt, the Complaint alleges that Biden as a candidate and later, through his administration, “colluded with and pressured social media giants Meta, Twitter, and Youtube to suppress and censor free speech.” Examples set forth in the suit include Twitter’s censoring of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and blocking of other Twitter users from sharing links to the story in October 2020 and Facebook’s (and other platforms’) aggressive censoring of speech concerning the Lab Leak Theory, beginning in February 2020.
In a lengthy tweet thread, Schmitt also details the chronology of interactions between the Biden campaign (and then administration) and social media companies involving “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
Now, scientists and doctors have added their voices to the collusion suit against the Biden administration and the social media companies that allegedly did their dirty work. In a press release, the New Civil Liberties Alliance announced earlier this week that it was joining the suit on behalf of its clients
renowned epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions.
This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to social media companies that only recently were made public.
The release continued by describing the types of censorship that many conservatives are, by now, very familiar with:
Government-induced censorship is achieved through a wide variety of mechanisms, ranging from complete bans, temporary bans, “shadow bans” (where often neither the user nor his audience is notified of the suppression of speech), deboosting, de-platforming, de-monetizing, restricting access to content, requiring users to take down content, and imposing warning labels that require click-through to access content, among others. These methods also include temporary and permanent suspensions of disfavored speakers.
This sort of censorship, which strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech—constitutes unlawful government action. The federal government is deciding whose voices and ideas may be heard, and whose voices and ideas must be silenced. Moreover, this state action deprives Americans of their right to hear the views of those who are being silenced, a First Amendment corollary of the right to free speech. The government’s policy of coercing social-media companies to censor Plaintiffs’ viewpoints should be declared unlawful and halted immediately.