Of all the ways in which we exercise our freedom in America, the exchange of information without the interference of government may be the most indispensable.
One can imagine times when the federal government is entitled to keep news or views from the American people; perhaps knowledge of a major defeat of our forces during wartime–although even that would be highly debatable, not to mention close to impossible in the age of the internet and cell phones; or recall when the U.S. Department of Energy sued the left-wing Progressive magazine in 1979 to prevent it from publishing details on how to build a hydrogen bomb. The case was dropped when the information became available in other public venues.
Well into the 21st century the muzzling of reports or analyses of events or trends is impossible, or very close to it. But what the government can do, and has done, is prevent widespread popular access to info, data, and even facts it disfavors. It can only do this, however, with the assistance of Big Tech—the companies who provide online news links, like Google, and who own the social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook: big businesses on which millions rely to know what news is hot, companies who take it upon themselves to discern what information is credible, and thus fit to be read.
The most glaring example, of course, was Twitter’s blocking of the New York Post’s investigative report on Hunter Biden’s laptop on the eve of the 2020 election through which Joe Biden became president, the rationale being the suspicion that the Hunter Biden scandal was little more than Russian disinformation. Even the now-ex-Twitter executive responsible admits that at the time, “it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.”
This kind of nursemaiding of the U.S. public, based on the pretense that people are too juvenile or gullible to be trusted with the free flow of facts, analyses, and viewpoints, is an outrage and a dangerous abuse of power. Especially considering that false, slanted, tendentious information favoring the left gets spread throughout cyberspace all the time by those with the loudest megaphones, going back even to before there was an internet.
On the July 4—appropriately—Louisiana Western District U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty forbade a slew of Biden administration officials, from cabinet secretaries and the White House press secretary to lower-level subordinates, from engaging with social media and other communications companies that include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
The prohibited conduct included “meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms”; “flagging” content; trying to get the platforms to “change their guidelines”; “requesting content reports from social-media companies”; and “notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (‘BOLO’) for postings containing protected free speech.” The judge’s exceptions included information involving “criminal activity” and “national security threats.”
Judge Doughty said of the Biden administration’s behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The case was brought by Missouri and other states, and joined by infectious disease epidemiologists and other interested parties. They joined together against government-engineered censorship targeting mostly conservative speech, in which “through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication,” the Biden administration has “colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.” As the judge remarked, “Freedom of speech and press is the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.”
What Biden and his staff did wasn’t along the lines of emergency powers that we would all accept, like preventing someone from urging people to take, say, large doses of strychnine to prevent the spread of smallpox. What the administration and Big Tech were censoring included “speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin … speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns ... speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines … speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election ... speech about the security of voting by mail ... parody content about Defendants [all Biden Administration officials] … negative posts about the economy,” and “negative posts about President Biden.”
In other words, exactly the kinds of political speech during a time of crisis that were anticipated by the framers of the Bill of Rights.
The quintessential example cited by the plaintiffs was how the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration in October, 2020, in which physicians and scientists warned of the physical and mental health consequences of the COVID lockdowns, was censored by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others. Just days after its publication, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and other officials were organizing a campaign to suppress and discredit the declaration.
The judge this week denied a motion by the Biden administration to stay the ruling preventing its officials’ politicized communications with Big Tech.
This is but the tip of the iceberg of the governmental offenses described in Judge Doughty’s 155-page opinion. When companies on which millions rely for news and information on their portable devices can be intimidated into doing the ideological bidding of government, they—and those millions of devices—might as well be owned by the government. Unfortunately, even a court order gagging Biden officials may not be of great consequence in the end, because these firms are so in sync with the Democratic Party, they likely already know what to censor before they are told.
