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Literally 3 days after Biden took office, the government’s censorship operation was flying. The White House immediately launched a pressure campaign on social media platforms to suppress supposed “COVID misinformation.” The Surgeon General launched his signature “disinformation” initiative at a Virality Project event at the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, Biden himself publicly pressured platforms on July 16, 2021—one day after his press secretary Jennifer Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy did the same, as the plaintiffs describe in their filing.The government’s first claim is that social media companies are economically incentivized to create policy that seeks to censor speech. But then the Plaintiffs went on to cite *just* 19 examples of censorship that never would have happened if the government hadn’t prompted them to.
The plaintiffs’ brief goes on to state that the depositions from government witnesses dispute the “economic incentive” excuse. In fact, many of the witnesses testified that social media platforms weren’t doing *enough* to censor and needed to do more to adjust their policies. Twitter specifically said it was “being told in no uncertain terms, by the public and by congress, that it had a responsibility to do a better job protecting future elections.”
FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan testified that pressure from Congress, the HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] and SSCI [United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]—including threats of adverse legislative action—prompted social platforms to make changes and censor more and be more “aggressive in account takedowns.”
Even Psaki and the White House didn’t believe the “economic incentives” theory, as she lamented that social media companies weren’t doing enough to censor speech. Facebook removed 18 million pieces of COVID “misinformation.” That wasn’t enough for Psaki.
I highly recommend you take the time to read the entire 125 pages, because if I commented on them all we would be here well into tomorrow, but the behavior of Rob Flaherty from the White House was particularly egregious. The Plaintiffs make sure to remind us that the First Amendment doesn’t have a “pandemic” exception.
Biden even accused Facebook of “killing people” and the next day threatened Section 230 action on social media companies that didn’t comply with their demands.