The Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri filed a lawsuit against President Biden and other top-ranking government officials for allegedly working with major social-media companies to suppress speech regarding the Covid pandemic and election integrity, among other topics, under the pretext of combating “misinformation.”
According to the lawsuit, the Biden administration is engaged in “open and explicit censorship programs” with companies such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube.
The lawsuit (pdf) reads,
Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.”
The culmination of the effort to silence dissenting opinions resulted in the establishment of the Disinformation Governance Board within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its head, Nina Jankowicz, is named as one of the defendants in the suit along with President Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, the president’s Chief Medical Advisor and NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, and others.
All of these actors were “colluding and coordinating with each other,” thereby enabling social-media companies to “identify” the wrong-think and “thus have procured the actual censorship and suppression of the freedom of speech.”
The attorneys argue that the Biden administration used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to coordinate the effort to censor certain groups and individuals online.
The top officials also “subsidized, fostered, encouraged, and empowered the creation of a small number of massive social-media companies with disproportionate ability to censor and suppress the speech on the basis of speaker, content, and viewpoint,” added the lawsuit.
For example, back in July 2021, Psaki and Murthy both argued that social-media platforms, particularly Facebook, should “do more” to combat health “misinformation.”
Psaki bragged to the press that the administration was “in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team.” Psaki also revealed that the administration was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.’”
Facebook then confirmed that it “partnered with government experts, health authorities and researchers to take ‘aggressive action against misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines to protect public health,’” according to the filing.
The lawsuit also pointed out the fact that DHS “intended to ‘partner with private firms’ to monitor disfavored speech online.”
While the platforms claim that they only purged “extreme” and “dangerous” content, the lawsuit argues they also blocked “perfectly legitimate, responsible viewpoints and speakers.”
Among the specific topics that the administration and the tech companies did not want the public to openly debate were the following.
The Hunter Biden Laptop: The bombshell story dedicated to the contents of Joe Biden’s son’s laptop that was abandoned in a Delaware computer repair shop, which was published by the New York Post on the eve of the presidential election in October of 2020, was not meant to be discussed, according to Twitter. The laptop contained “compromising pictures and emails,” as put by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt.
Schmidt reminded the public that Twitter locked the newspaper’s main Twitter account and “blocked other users from publishing the link to the story as it was ‘potentially harmful’.”
In April 2022, the laptop was recognized as genuine.
The Covid Lab-leak Theory: The lawsuit cites Facebook’s censorship of posts that theorized that SARS-CoV-2 could have been engineered and then leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The lawsuit describes how Dr. Fauci collaborated with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “regarding the control and dissemination of COVID-19 information” while working on the discrediting of the lab-leak theory and insisting the virus came from nature.
According to the emails cited in the lawsuit, Zuckerberg was pleased to oblige and proposed coordinating with Fauci to “make sure people can get authoritative information from reliable sources” such as Dr. Fauci himself.
“Only after a large number of major media outlets confirmed that the lab-leak theory was a possibility did Facebook stop censoring user posts related to the lab-leak theory,” said Schmitt.
The Efficacy of Masks: Among other platforms, Twitter and YouTube put a policy in place that prohibited posting content on the inefficacy of facemasks in preventing the spread of Covid. A number of prominent figures in the realms of politics and science have been censured for questioning the masks’ usage.
The attorney general notes, “Now, a growing body of science shows that masks, especially cloth masks, are ineffective at stopping the spread of COVID-19, and can impose negative impacts on children.”
2020 Election Fraud: In conjunction with Democratic messaging on the topic, social media was censoring speech about the security of voting by mail in the 2020 election and other means allegedly undermining election integrity.
“Notoriously, social-media platforms aggressively censored core political speech by then-President Trump and the Trump campaign raising concerns about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the November 2020 presidential election,” the filing states.
The evidence of widespread voting irregularities continues to emerge day by day.
“Big Tech has become an extension of Biden’s Big Government, and neither are protecting the freedoms of Americans; rather, they are suppressing truth and demonizing those who think differently,” said Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in a statement, likening the Biden administration to “Stalin and his ilk.”
The attorneys general are asking the court to recognize that the Biden administration’s actions violate the First Amendment and exceed its constitutional authority. In addition, they specifically claim that the DHS and HHS officials’ conduct must be deemed an abuse of power.
