Supreme Court to hear case on Biden admin censorship collusion with Big Tech
(LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that this March it will hear the case concerning the actions of federal agencies in removing and suppressing COVID “misinformation” content from social media at the behest of the Biden administration.
As The Washington Examiner reported on January 29:
The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear arguments on March 18 in Murthy v. Missouri, a major case involving free speech, government agencies, and social media that could have monumental implications for content moderation.
The case is significant, as it treats the 2023 decision of the Supreme Court to stop an injunction which ordered the Biden administration to halt its online censorship of a host of controversial subjects, including “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
“This case will have a giant impact, one way or another on the U.S. Bill of Rights’ and Constitution’s First Amendment explicit protection of free speech, a critical foundation for the continued existence of the Republic,” warned LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac. “A negative decision will facilitate a rapid descent into greater tyranny in the nation most admired internationally for its unique protections of free speech.”
“In other words, if the Supreme Court decides against the plaintiffs, they will initiate a catastrophic end to that foundational right in America which will inevitably also be exploited by globalists to crush free speech in many other nations,” he continued, adding, “Everything is at stake in this decision.”
The case bears the name of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose interest is explained in a statement made in 2021. Speaking in support of the suppression of “misinformation” – a term used to describe often true information that threatens the mainstream media narrative – he said at the time, “modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment, with little accountability to their users. “
The document linked above details last year’s dissenting opinion of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, who will likely argue in the forthcoming case that the Biden administration supplied no evidence in support of its claims to be reducing harm through systematic censorship.
An injunction preventing the Biden administration was lifted on October 20, 2023, by the Supreme Court, before it had heard any arguments.
The March session of the Supreme Court is provided to have these arguments heard, and to produce a more definitive ruling on the extent of First Amendment protections on social media platforms.
Supreme Court to hear case on Biden admin censorship collusion with Big Tech
(LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that this March it will hear the case concerning the actions of federal agencies in removing and suppressing COVID “misinformation” content from social media at the behest of the Biden administration.
As The Washington Examiner reported on January 29:
The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear arguments on March 18 in Murthy v. Missouri, a major case involving free speech, government agencies, and social media that could have monumental implications for content moderation.
The case is significant, as it treats the 2023 decision of the Supreme Court to stop an injunction which ordered the Biden administration to halt its online censorship of a host of controversial subjects, including “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
“This case will have a giant impact, one way or another on the U.S. Bill of Rights’ and Constitution’s First Amendment explicit protection of free speech, a critical foundation for the continued existence of the Republic,” warned LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac. “A negative decision will facilitate a rapid descent into greater tyranny in the nation most admired internationally for its unique protections of free speech.”
“In other words, if the Supreme Court decides against the plaintiffs, they will initiate a catastrophic end to that foundational right in America which will inevitably also be exploited by globalists to crush free speech in many other nations,” he continued, adding, “Everything is at stake in this decision.”
The case bears the name of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose interest is explained in a statement made in 2021. Speaking in support of the suppression of “misinformation” – a term used to describe often true information that threatens the mainstream media narrative – he said at the time, “modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment, with little accountability to their users. “
The document linked above details last year’s dissenting opinion of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, who will likely argue in the forthcoming case that the Biden administration supplied no evidence in support of its claims to be reducing harm through systematic censorship.
An injunction preventing the Biden administration was lifted on October 20, 2023, by the Supreme Court, before it had heard any arguments.
The March session of the Supreme Court is provided to have these arguments heard, and to produce a more definitive ruling on the extent of First Amendment protections on social media platforms.
subscribe to our daily headlines
The three justices’ 2023 objection, filed against the lifting of the injunction, provided the following summary:
This case concerns what two lower courts found to be a ‘coordinated campaign’ by high-level federal officials to suppress the _expression_ of disfavored views on important public issues.
The justices noted that the Biden administration was then ordered to stop “actively controlling” social media companies’ content decisions.
“To prevent the continuation of this campaign, these officials were enjoined from either “coerc[ing]” social media companies to engage in such censorship or “active[ly] control[ling]” those companies’ decisions about the content posted on their platforms,” they wrote.
The dissenting justices explained that the decision by their fellow Supreme Court judges to suspend this injunction overturned – without evidence – the findings of lower courts, and postponed the review of their decision to do so until the Spring of 2024. This is a reference to the upcoming case.
“A majority of the Court, without undertaking a full review of the record and without any explanation, suspends the effect of that injunction until the Court completes its review of this case, an event that may not occur until late in the spring of next year,” they wrote at the time.
Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas’ opinion stated, “Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.”
Their opinion concluded with an observation which framed the contentious issue of state control of social media.
At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news.
The case, formerly known as Missouri v. Biden, was originally brought by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
These two state attorneys general argued that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by working with Facebook (now known as Meta), Twitter (now X), and YouTube to censor and suppress content critical of covid policies, “vaccines,” the 2020 election and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Western District of Louisiana then issued its injunction which suspended communications between Big Tech companies and the Biden administration.
The forthcoming Supreme Court decision may decide the status of free speech in America. Though the First Amendment prohibits restrictions on free speech by federal agencies, the legality of federal influence over social media companies is not clearly defined.
A brief has been prepared by 45 U.S. members of Congress to be submitted to the Supreme Court, in what GOP Rep. Jim Jordan calls “one of the most important free speech cases in years.” Six senators have also approved the brief, including Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
The brief, which is available here, has been prepared in conjunction with America First Legal.
According to a February 9 report by campaign group Reclaim the Net, the document presents “…arguments…previously raised in the Fifth Circuit, where AFL represented Representative Jordan and other members of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
In addition to the suppression of COVID material and of the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell,” the brief also charges “the suppression of First Amendment-protected speech concerning… the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling.”
The detailed brief names one federal agency specifically. This is CISA – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose extensive mention begins with the following summary:
CISA’s focus on so-called ‘malinformation’ is particularly alarming. According to CISA, ‘[m]alinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.’
The brief states that the agency effectively censors on behalf of the Biden administration.
“Put more plainly, ‘malinformation’ is factual information that is objectionable not because it is false or untruthful, but because it is provided without adequate ‘context’— context as determined by the government.”
A private company which worked in tandem with CISA is named as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which the brief claims was the conduit through which CISA’s government-mandated censorship was run.
“The United States [government], primarily [through] CISA, also coerced social media companies into censoring speech about the 2020 election through the private-sector Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), led by Stanford University.”
This NGO was partnered with federal agencies to carry out real-time censorship.
Formed in the summer of 2020, EIP was a coalition of research entities created “in consultation with CISA and other stakeholders,” which “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.”
Why was a private company used? The brief explains:
The United States [government] sought to use EIP to do things that the government could not do without violating the First Amendment – namely, directly monitoring and censoring speech.
The brief further highlights the continuing efforts of the U.S. government to develop ever more sophisticated censorship technologies, saying, “The United States is funding research and tools to enable censorship at scale.”
“The House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have also uncovered how the National Science Foundation (NSF) uses taxpayer funds for research into AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools through its Convergence Accelerator Track F program,” adds the brief.
The brief cites the wide-scoped reporting of investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, whose investigation into the Twitter Files released by Elon Musk showed extensive influence over content policies by serving and former members of U.S. federal intelligence agencies. It refers also to the similar Facebook Files, showing extensive evidence of how, according to Jordan, “The Biden White House wanted to control what you saw on Facebook.”
The brief concludes:
Wielding threats of intervention, the executive branch of the federal government has engaged in a sustained effort to coerce private parties into censoring speech on matters of public concern.
On issue after issue, the Biden Administration has distorted the free marketplace of ideas promised by the First Amendment, bringing the weight of federal authority to bear on any speech it dislikes – including memes and jokes.
The issue here is not restricted to censorship, but also reveals an alleged “ideological alliance” between the Biden administration and the Big Tech companies themselves, which according to Jordan explains their willingness to censor.
Of course, Big Tech companies often required little coercion to do the Administration’s bidding on some issues. Generally eager to please their ideological allies and overseers in the federal government, these companies and other private entities have repeatedly censored accurate speech on important public issues.
Crucially, the document also highlights the fact that the Biden administration pressured platforms to censor more aggressively.
“When the censors were too slow to suppress speech that the partisans in the Administration disliked, the federal government prodded them back into action with continual and increasing pressure.”
The case made here is that the U.S. government under Biden has acted illegally.
“Official pressure to suppress speech violates the First Amendment,” the brief charges.
The hearing at which this brief is to be submitted is set to commence on March 18.