Years of government takedown requests and meetings with social media platforms to discuss “misinformation” will culminate Monday in a case before the Supreme Court.
The case, Murthy v. Missouri, asks the justices to consider what a district court judge referenced as the Biden administration’s “Orwellian” efforts to suppress speech online.
Supreme Court to consider Biden administration censorship efforts in historic free speech case https://t.co/KYL2S974Gd
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) March 18, 2024
It stems from a lawsuit filed in 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with five individual plaintiffs whose own speech was censored on social media.
“Even if you have not been personally censored, you’ve been impacted by this censorship because the First Amendment exists, not just for the speaker, but also for the listener,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of three doctors who joined the case as a plaintiff, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“It’s necessary in a democracy that people have access to both sides of a contested issue or a public debate,” he added.
Records obtained by the plaintiffs in the course of the litigation highlighted explicit requests by the White House asking platforms to remove posts “ASAP” or take down an account “immediately” — along with demands using more colorful language.
“After the White House’s escalation of pressure in July 2021, platforms responded by treating the CDC as the final authority on what could and could not be posted on their platforms,” the plaintiff’s brief filed with the Supreme Court notes, adding that platforms “capitulated to virtually all White House demands going forward.”
In July, a district court judge issued an injunction barring Biden administration officials in agencies from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) to the FBI from communicating with social media platforms for the purposes of censoring speech, writing that the allegations in the case involved arguably “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
The Fifth Circuit later affirmed a narrower version of the injunction. The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to uphold the injunction and find that the social media companies’ removal of content due to government pressure constitutes state action.
Court records revealed the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flagged posts for platforms to remove and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) engaged in “switchboarding,” which is sending misinformation flagged by state and local election officials to social media companies for removal.
The administration has defended its actions through every stage of litigation by asserting its own rights to “use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern.”
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Author: Burroughs
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