OPINION:
A U.S. District Court ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, cannot coerce social media companies to remove content, as it is protected free speech.
The 155-page ruling bars the White House from contacting social media companies in order to police and censor their sites. The injunction came in a lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who charged the Biden administration created a “federal censorship enterprise” to curtail posts they viewed as “disinformation.”
“[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” District Judge Terry Doughty wrote in the ruling. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
He continued: “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
He noted that conservative views were almost exclusively targeted and censored.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House bullied platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to take down posts it viewed as “disinformation.” These include the theory that COVID-19 may be the result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and that COVID-19 vaccines didn’t prevent one from getting the infection. Criticism of mask and vaccine mandates, lockdown policies and school closings were all targeted.
Ironically, much of this “disinformation” was actually true.
The lawsuit claims the FBI, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, conspired with social media platforms “in hundreds of meetings about misinformation” and flagged “huge quantities of First Amendment-protected speech to platforms for censorship.”
“What a way to celebrate Independence Day,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey tweeted in response to Tuesday’s ruling. He called the case the “most important First Amendment lawsuit in a generation.”
Still, there’s more work to be done.
House Republicans have convened the House Weaponization Subcommittee dedicated to uncovering how deep the collusion is between the federal government and social media companies.
A new report from the subcommittee uncovered a national security agency considered deploying a “rapid response team” last summer to help election officials in local jurisdictions uncover “mis-, dis- and mal-information threats,” including through social media.
CISA “has coordinated with federal agencies and a coterie of often federally funding ‘anti-disinformation’ [nongovernmental organizations] to chide, cajole and collude with Big Tech companies to impose a mass public-private surveillance and censorship regime on the American people,” the New York Post reported this week.
“It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work,” a former CIA lawyer working at a subcommittee at CISA wrote in a May 2022 email that was uncovered in the House report.
The GOP effort to understand and define the massive surveillance and censorship regime set up within our federal government is important in dismantling it.
The House Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment to its annual National Defense Authorization Act, defunding disinformation units in the military. The Homeland Security Committee is working to do the same in its appropriation bill.
These actions, along with court orders, are huge steps in protecting our First Amendment rights.
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