A federal judge issued an injunction Tuesday prohibiting Biden administration officials and federal agencies from communicating with social media companies about certain forms of protected speech.
The 155-page ruling details numerous clear violations of the First Amendment’s free speech clause. Amply referenced and footnoted, the document describes how Biden administration officials demanded that social media companies suppress information and deplatform people who expressed political views they deemed harmful.
“This ruling has been widely reported as barring the administration from ‘working with,’ ‘contacting,’ or ‘coordinating with’ social media,” said Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is mentioned in the injunction as one of the people censored on social media.
“These are euphemisms. The case is about blatant censorship, in which government agencies colluded with and coerced tech platforms to censor Constitutionally-protected speech.”
As described in the injunction, government censorship demands were backed with threats to revoke Article 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media companies from liability for actions taken on their websites, as well as the threat of anti-trust action. Both of these, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, are “existential threats” to social media companies’ business.
The injunction describes the formation of a censorship apparatus that includes public-private partnerships with groups like the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and the Election Integrity Project. They operated not only through direct demands, but also through creating a tacit consensus about what information is permissible.
Disallowed posts and suppressed information included those:
- Questioning the safety of the Covid vaccines
- Claiming the shots did not prevent infection or transmission
- Doubting the utility of masks and lockdowns
- Suggesting the lab leak hypothesis for Covid origins
- Questioning the integrity of the 2020 elections
- Claiming the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop story
“The judge got it exactly right when he wrote, ‘Freedom of speech and press is the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom,’” Kennedy said. “Without freedom of speech, there is no democracy.”
Attorneys for Team Kennedy are considering further legal action to protect Mr. Kennedy’s rights and those of the campaign to be heard, free of censorship.
Learn more at Kennedy24.com.
