The government continues to be at liberty to unconstitutionally suppress speech it finds objectionable through its Big Tech cutouts, a federal appeals court recently ruled.
Related: The 'Virality Project:' Federal Government Caught Red-Handed Censoring COVID-19 Truth
Via Reuters (emphasis added):
“Meta Platforms defeated an appeal by Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenging its censorship of Facebook posts that spread misinformation about vaccines' efficacy and safety.
In a decision on Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, said the nonprofit did not show that Meta worked with or was coerced by federal officials to suppress views challenging "government orthodoxy" on vaccines.
Children's Health Defense sued in 2020, saying that Meta had violated its constitutional rights by flagging "vaccine misinformation" as false, and taking away its right to advertise on Facebook.”
The claim that the government does not coerce social media companies to censor on its behalf is abject nonsense. The Twitter Files, most famously, among many other endeavors by independent journalists, has proved this in spades — which never would have seen the light of day, by the way, if Elon Musk hadn’t bought the platform and released the correspondence between FBI cutouts and Twitter, which included not-so-veiled demands and even threats to take down unapproved content.
Related: How Insidious, Particular U.S. Corporate Media Censorship Threatens Free Speech
Via Children’s Health Defense (emphasis added):
“CHD’s suit accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies of “privatizing” the First Amendment by teaming up with Facebook to censor speech which, “under the Bill of Rights, the Government cannot censor.”
According to the lawsuit, filed in August 2020 — and amended in December 2020 — the CDC and the World Health Organization “collaborated closely with Facebook to suppress vaccine safety speech by using a ‘warning label’ and other similar types of notices which, while purporting to flag misinformation, in reality censor valid and truthful speech, including content posted by plaintiff on its Facebook page regarding vaccines.”
This collaboration amounted to “state action” and was in violation of the First Amendment, CHD said…
The court… ruled that CHD failed to allege any facts that would suggest an agreement between the government and Meta that “required Meta to take a particular action in response to misinformation about vaccines or that the government coerced Meta into implementing a specific policy.””
Even if the government didn’t make explicit demands for Meta to censor, there don’t need to be for Meta to understand what it has to do to stay on Daddy’s good side, or else out comes the belt. The implicit threat of legal action suffices.
Here’s a novel solution.
Next Republican Congress: pass a law stating explicitly that the government not be allowed to discuss content moderation with social media companies at all, full-stop. Problem solved.
The CDC and whoever else can publish their nonsense on their own websites in their own press releases. That’s their domain — although they should be investigated and prosecuted when they lie and waste public resources, which happens all day, every day.
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