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Thread: Missouri & Louisiana sue feds for colluding with Big Tech censors

  1. #1

    Missouri & Louisiana sue feds for colluding with Big Tech censors

    THIS is the kind of thing that needs to be happening - not any more of that "let's pass some more laws" BS.

    Sic the states on the feds, not the feds on Big Tech.

    (And technically, I don't know if "sue" was the right word to use in the thread title, but it's briefer than "file preliminary injunction against".)

    PDF: Plaintiffs' memorandum in support of motion for preliminary injunction

    https://twitter.com/Eric_Schmitt/sta...18087953039362


    Additional tweet images hidden to save space:
     
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 06-14-2022 at 07:55 PM.
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    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
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  3. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    THIS is the kind of thing that needs to be happening - not any more of that "let's pass some more laws" BS.

    Sic the states on the feds, not the feds on Big Tech.

    (And technically, I don't know if "sue" was the right word to use in the thread title, but it's briefer than "file preliminary injunction against".)

    PDF: Plaintiffs' memorandum in support of motion for preliminary injunction

    https://twitter.com/Eric_Schmitt/sta...18087953039362


    Additional tweet images hidden to save space:
     
    Sue is the correct word. You have to sue someone in order to get an injunction, preliminary, temporary or permanent.



    And I hope they use every weapon currently in their arsenal. 42 USC 1983 civil rights act, anti trust act, RICO. They've got Zuckerberg dead to rights from the Fauci emails. Now all of Zucker's collaborators need to be roped in.
    9/11 Thermate experiments

    Winston Churchhill on why the U.S. should have stayed OUT of World War I

    "I am so %^&*^ sick of this cult of Ron Paul. The Paulites. What is with these %^&*^ people? Why are there so many of them?" YouTube rant by "TheAmazingAtheist"

    "We as a country have lost faith and confidence in freedom." -- Ron Paul

    "It can be a challenge to follow the pronouncements of President Trump, as he often seems to change his position on any number of items from week to week, or from day to day, or even from minute to minute." -- Ron Paul
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No need to make it a superhighway.
    Quote Originally Posted by osan View Post
    The only way I see Trump as likely to affect any real change would be through martial law, and that has zero chances of success without strong buy-in by the JCS at the very minimum.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by jmdrake View Post
    Sue is the correct word. You have to sue someone in order to get an injunction, preliminary, temporary or permanent.
    That's what I thought, but I wasn't certain. Thanks!

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    THIS is the kind of thing that needs to be happening - not any more of that "let's pass some more laws" BS.

    Sic the states on the feds, not the feds on Big Tech.
    I've been saying this for years, that we need to make sure the government isn't censoring big tech behind the scenes. The last thing we need is to have the Feds regulating web site content. A lot of people here were suggesting we should punish facebook, google, etc by hitting them with antitrust laws. That's the dumbest solution. That would make the Fed's in charge of who stays in business and who is out based on what they publish. What could possibly go wrong there?

    I've been suspicious of the government leaning on big tech ever since they had those hearings where government officials were demanding to know why Alex Jones was still allowed on Facebook. We need to get government out of the censoring business not in it.

  6. #5
    https://twitter.com/Eric_Schmitt/sta...49137578569729


    (additional matter hidden to save space)
     


  7. #6
    Emails PROVE Government Is Colluding With Big Tech To Censor Conservatives
    https://odysee.com/@TimcastIRL:8/ema...is-colluding:e

  8. #7
    (h/t @PAF: The US Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime)

    Jenin Younes is litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

    She represents Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, who (along with the states of Missouri and Louisiana) are plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden.

    The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime
    Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/a...sorship-regime
    Jenin Younes (20 September 2022)

    One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.

    The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.

    Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardian still like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.

    Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a video depicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.

    Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”

    Federal district courts have recently dismissed similar cases on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove state action. According to those judges, public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so, still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were censored on social media due to government action. Put another way, the judges declined to take the government at its word. But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage.

    The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

    Correspondence publicized in Missouri further corroborates the theory that the companies dramatically increased censorship under duress from the government, strengthening the First Amendment claim. For example, shortly after President Biden asserted in July of 2021 that Facebook (Meta) was “killing people” by permitting “misinformation” about COVID vaccines to percolate, an executive from the company contacted the surgeon general to appease the White House. In a text message to Murthy, the executive acknowledged that the “FB team” was “feeling a little aggrieved” as “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” while he sought to “de-escalate and work together collaboratively.” These are not the words of a person who is acting freely; to the contrary, they denote the mindset of someone who considers himself subordinate to, and subject to punishment by, a superior. Another text, exchanged between Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and another CISA employee who now works at Microsoft, reads: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is another incontrovertible piece of evidence that social media companies are censoring content under duress from the government, and not due to their directors’ own ideas of the corporate or common good.

    urther, emails expressly establish that the social media companies intensified censorship efforts and removed particular individuals from their platforms in response to the government’s demands. Just a week after President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” the Meta executive mentioned above wrote the surgeon general an email telling him, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken further to address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to [them].” About a month later, the same executive informed Murthy that Meta intended to expand its COVID policies to “further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content” and that the company was “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content.”

    Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and a prominent critic of government-imposed COVID restrictions, has publicized internal Twitter communications he obtained through discovery in his own lawsuit showing that high-ranking members of the Biden administration, including White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, had pushed Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform. In messages from April 2021, a Twitter employee noted that a meeting with the White House had gone relatively well, though the company’s representatives had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” to which “mercifully we had answers” (emphasis added).

    About two months later, days after Dr. Fauci publicly deemed Berenson a danger, and immediately following the president’s statement that social media companies were “killing people,” and despite assurances from high-ups at the company that his account was in no danger, Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account. If this does not qualify as government censorship of an individual based on official disapproval of his viewpoints, it would be difficult to say what might. Berenson was reinstated on Twitter in July 2022 as part of the settlement in his lawsuit.

    *****

    In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v. Sullivan, held that “public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against” booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same reasoning should apply to the Biden administration campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its preferred viewpoints.

    The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. Just like the booksellers in Bantam, social media platforms undoubtedly “do not lightly disregard” such possible consequences, as Twitter’s use of the term “mercifully” indicates.

    It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great Barrington Declaration. More discovery lies ahead, from top White House officials including Dr. Fauci, that may yield evidence of even more direct involvement by the government in preventing Americans from hearing their views. But Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and countless social media users have had their First Amendment rights violated nonetheless.

    The government’s involvement in censorship of specific perspectives, and direct role in escalating such censorship, has what is known in First Amendment law as a chilling effect: Fearing the repercussions of articulating certain views, people self-censor by avoiding controversial topics. Countless Americans, including the Missouri plaintiffs, have attested that they do exactly that for fear of losing influential and sometimes lucrative social media accounts, which can contain and convey significant social and intellectual capital.

    Moreover, the Supreme Court recognizes that a corollary of the First Amendment right to speak is the right to receive information because “the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender’s First Amendment right to send them.” All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, and myriad additional people, like the reporters who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post and found themselves denounced as agents of Russian disinformation, who have been censored by social media platforms at the urging of the U.S. government. That deprivation strangled public debate on multiple issues of undeniably public importance. It allowed Fauci, Collins, and various other government actors and agencies, to mislead the public into believing there was ever a scientific consensus on lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. It also arguably influenced the 2020 election.

    The administration has achieved public acquiescence to its censorship activities by convincing many Americans that the dissemination of “misinformation” and “disinformation” on social media presents a grave threat to public safety and even national security. Over half a century ago, in his notorious concurrence in New York Times v. United States (in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the newspaper from printing the Pentagon Papers) Justice Hugo Black rejected the view that the government may invoke such concepts to override the First Amendment: “[t]he word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment,” he wrote. Justice Black cited a 1937 opinion by Justice Charles Hughes explaining that this approach was woefully misguided: “The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly ... that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.”

    The Founders of our country understood that line-drawing becomes virtually impossible once censorship begins and that the personal views and biases of those doing the censoring will inevitably come into play. Moreover, they recognized that sunlight is the best disinfectant: The cure for bad speech is good speech. The cure for lies, truth. Silencing people does not mean problematic ideas disappear; it only drives their adherents into echo chambers. People who are booted off Twitter, for example, often turn to Gab and Gettr, where they are less likely to encounter challenges to patently false posts claiming, for example, that COVID vaccines are toxic.

    Indeed, this case could not illustrate more clearly the First Amendment’s chief purpose, and why the framers of the Constitution did not create an exception for “misinformation.” Government actors are just as prone to bias, hubris, and error as the rest of us. Drs. Fauci and Collins, enamored of newfound fame and basking in self-righteousness, took it upon themselves to suppress debate about the most important subject of the day. Had Americans learned of the Great Barrington Declaration and been given the opportunity to contemplate its ideas, and had scientists like Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff been permitted to speak freely, the history of the pandemic era may have unfolded with far less tragedy—and with far less damage to the institutions that are supposed to protect public health.

  9. #8
    In other completely unrelated news:

    https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/...16438806102018



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  11. #9
    https://twitter.com/AGEricSchmitt/st...90258101882881


    Missouri, Louisiana Request Depositions and Add 47 Defendants to Lawsuit Against Federal Government for Alleged Collusion with Social Media Companies
    https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/10...edia-companies
    (Office of MO AG) Eric Schmitt (10 Ocotiber 2022)

    Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry have filed a second amended complaint that adds 47 defendants (total of 67) to their lawsuit against the federal government for allegedly colluding with social media giants to censor freedom of speech. The list of new defendants include top officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the White House, and others. Further, Missouri and Louisiana plan to file a motion soon requesting that the Court allow the states to take the depositions of a number of key defendants.

    “Missouri and Louisiana filed a landmark lawsuit, seeking to expose that the federal government has worked hand-in-hand with social media companies to censor freedom of speech on their platforms. Our lawsuit has done exactly that – we’ve found a staggering ‘censorship enterprise’ that extends to a multitude of federal agencies and implicates government officials at the highest levels of government, but we’re not done yet,” said Attorney General Schmitt. “Now, we’ve added 47 additional defendants to our lawsuit, including several FBI agents and more top-ranking White House officials. We’re also asking the Court to allow our offices to take depositions to question these officials under oath. We’re only just getting started.”

    "Throughout this case, we have uncovered a disturbing amount of collusion between Big Tech and Big Government," added Attorney General Landry. "This egregious attack on our First Amendment will be met with an equally full-hearted defense of the rights of the American people."

    Included on the list of new defendants are top White House officials Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty and White House Counsel Dana Remus, FBI Section Chief for the Foreign Influence Task Force Laura Dehmlow, CDC Deputy Communications Director Kate Galatas, and other top-ranking officials.

    Referring to the addition of the FBI defendants, the petition states, “Defendant Laura Dehmlow is the Section Chief for the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. She is sued in her official capacity… Defendant Elvis M. Chan is Supervisory Special Agent of Squad CY-1 in the San Francisco Division of the FBI. On information and belief, he has authority over cybersecurity issues for FBI in that geographical region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms, and he plays a critical role for FBI and FITF in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms.”

    The complaint continued, “Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

    Missouri and Louisiana have also provided an initial list of requested deposition subjects to the Department of Justice, and plan to file a motion asking the Court to grant deposition requests and allow Missouri and Louisiana to question, under oath, certain defendants named in the lawsuit.

    The complaint alleges, “Such communications from the White House impose maximal pressure on social-media companies, which clearly yields the sought-after results. And federal officials are fully aware that such pressure is necessary to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship of views that diverge from the government’s. CISA Director Jen Easterly, for example, texted with Matthew Masterson about ‘trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand the mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful,’ and complained about the Government’s need to overcome the social-media platforms’ ‘hesitation’ to working with the government: ‘Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.’”

    In that same vein, the complaint notes, “In fact, such pressure from government officials on social-media companies, along with the many public statements alleged in the Complaint, have succeeded on a grand scale. A veritable army of federal bureaucrats are involved in censorship activities ‘across the federal enterprise.’ There are so many, in fact, that CISA Director Easterly and Matthew Masterson complained in text messages that ‘chaos’ would result if all federal officials were ‘independently’ contacting social-media platforms about so-called misinformation… On information and belief, as alleged above, the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ was created to impose a bureaucratic structure on the enormous censorship activities already occurring involving dozens of federal officials and many federal agencies.”

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    Sic the states on the feds, not the feds on Big Tech.
    https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statu...96152768974848

  13. #11
    Mark my words, Eric Schmitt will soon learn the benefits of social media controls from his new position in the House of Lords.

    His lawsuit serves as a prop to propel his political career.

    Eric Schmitt's name will be more associated with Lindsey Graham than it will be with Rand Paul.

  14. #12
    PDF: MEMORANDUM ORDER REGARDING WITNESS DEPOSITIONS

    Judge to allow states to depose Fauci, Biden officials in social media censorship case
    "It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth," said Schmitt.
    https://thepostmillennial.com/breaki...ensorship-case
    Hannah Nightingale (21 October 2022)

    On Friday evening, a judge granted a motion filed by Missouri and Louisiana calling for key figures in the Biden administration to be deposed in regard to the administration’s work with social media platforms to suppress free speech.

    In a Friday tweet, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said that the US District Court Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division granted the plaintiffs’ request to depose Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, as well as other Biden Administration officials.

    The lawsuit, filed by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in May, alleges that key figures in the Biden administration, including President Joe Biden himself, "have colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content 'dis-information,’ 'mis-information,' and 'mal-information.'"

    They allege that the actions constitute as "government action," and violates freedom of speech as laid out in the First Amendment.

    Examples laid out include the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, talk of the Covid-19 lab leak theory, questioning the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as well as censorship of specific individuals.

    "After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the Biden Administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath," said Schmitt.

    "It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth."

  15. #13

  16. #14

  17. #15
    The White House Covid Censorship Machine
    Newly released emails show how officials coerce social-media companies to toe the government line.
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-h...le-11673203704
    [archive link: https://archive.ph/6AmyG]
    Jenin Younes & Aaron Kheriaty (08 January 2023)

    Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

    On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. . . . We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. . . . This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

    On March 21, after failing to placate Mr. Flaherty, the Facebook executive sent an email detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” Facebook characterized this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”

    In that exchange, Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what Facebook was doing to “limit the spread of viral content” on WhatsApp, a private message app, especially “given its reach in immigrant communities and communities of color.” The company responded three weeks later with a lengthy list of promises.

    On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure . . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . . . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase skepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”

    On April 14, Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why “the top post about vaccines today” is Tucker Carlson “saying they don’t work”: “I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,” he said. The exec responded: “Running this down now.”

    On April 23, Mr. Flaherty sent the executive an internal memo that he claimed had been circulating in the White House. It asserts that “Facebook plays a major role in the spread of COVID vaccine misinformation” and accuses the company of, among other things, “failure to monitor events hosting anti-vaccine and COVID disinformation” and “directing attention to COVID-skeptics/anti-vaccine ‘trusted’ messengers.”

    On May 10, the executive sent Mr. Flaherty a list of steps Facebook had taken “to increase vaccine acceptance.” Mr. Flaherty scoffed, “Hard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages in search,” and linked to an NBC reporter’s tweet. The executive wrote back: “Thanks Rob—both of the accounts featured in this tweet have been removed from Instagram entirely for breaking our policies.”

    President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.

    Mr. Flaherty also strong-armed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of “funneling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavored content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”

    These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.

    Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk's release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

    The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.

    Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.

    The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.

    Ms. Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represents the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. Dr. Kheriaty is a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and one of the plaintiffs.

  18. #16
    https://twitter.com/AGAndrewBailey/s...23293143564293
    [Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...143564293.html]


    [additional matter hidden to save space]


    Missouri Attorney General Releases More Documents Exposing White House's Social Media Censorship Scheme
    https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2023/01...sorship-scheme
    Missouri Attorney General (09 January 2023)

    JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - In order to protect the constitutional liberties of all Americans, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey continues to pursue litigation in Missouri v. Biden, a civil case demonstrating that top officials in the federal government colluded with Big tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment. Today’s documents display White House Digital Director Robert Flaherty and his team’s efforts to censor opposing viewpoints on major social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

    “I want to protect Missourians and the freedoms they enjoy, which is why as Attorney General, I will always defend the Constitution. This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Attorney General Bailey. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”

    Exhibits include:


    Missouri v. Biden was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana on May 5, 2022. They filed for a Motion for Expedited Preliminary Injunction-Related Discovery on June 17, 2022, and that motion was granted on July 12, 2022, clearing the way for Missouri and Louisiana to gather discovery and documents from Biden Administration and social media companies.

    The request for depositions was filed on October 10, 2022, and that motion was granted on October 21, 2022, allowing Missouri and Louisiana to depose top-ranking officials in the federal government under oath. So far, Missouri and Louisiana have deposed Dr. Anthony Fauci, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, Eric Waldo of the Surgeon General’s Office, Carol Crawford of the CDC, and Daniel Kimmage of the State Department. Depositions continue.



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  20. #17
    https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/...85332441108480

  21. #18

  22. #19
    THREAD: How the CDC Became the Speech Police

    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC's Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent
    Throughout the pandemic, the CDC was in constant contact with Facebook, vetting what users were allowed to say on the social media site.
    ROBBY SOAVE | 1.19.2023
    FTA:

    [...]

    The Facebook Files, which were obtained by Reason as a result of the state of Missouri's lawsuit against the Biden administration, reveal that the CDC had substantial influence over what users were allowed to discuss on Meta's platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

    [...]


    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    How the CDC Became the Speech Police
    Secret internal Facebook emails reveal the feds' campaign to pressure social media companies into banning COVID "misinformation."
    ROBBY SOAVE | FROM THE MARCH 2023 ISSUE
    FTA:

    [...]

    Combating misinformation has remained a top goal for Fauci. The day after his final White House press conference, he sat for a seven-hour deposition conducted by Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in November). While the proceedings were closed to the public, courtroom participants say Fauci insisted that misinformation and disinformation were grave threats to public health, and that he had done his best to counteract them. (He also demanded that the court reporter wear a mask in his presence. Her allergies had given her the sniffles, she claimed.)

    The deposition was part of Schmitt v. Biden, a lawsuit that accuses the federal government of improperly pushing private social media companies to restrict so-called misinformation relating to COVID-19. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, professors of medicine at Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively, have claimed that social media platforms repeatedly muzzled their opposition to lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest law firm that has joined the lawsuit, thinks the federal government's campaign to squelch contrarian coronavirus content was so vast as to effectively violate the First Amendment.

    "What's at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age," says Jenin Younes, the group's litigation counsel. "We've never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding in terms of censoring people."

    These concerns are well-founded, as the emails obtained by Reason make clear. Over the course of the pandemic, CDC officials exchanged dozens of messages with content moderators. Most of these came from Carol Crawford, the CDC's digital media chief. She did not respond to a request for comment.

    "If you look at it in isolation, it looks like [the CDC and the tech companies] are working together," says Younes. "But you have to view it in light of the threats."

    Facebook is a private entity, and thus is within its rights to moderate content in any fashion it sees fit. But the federal government's efforts to pressure social media companies cannot be waved away. A private company may choose to exclude certain perspectives, but if the company only takes such action after politicians and bureaucrats threaten it, reasonable people might conclude the choice was an illusion. Such an arrangement—whereby private entities, at the behest of the government, become ideological enforcers—is unacceptable. And it may be illegal.

    [...]
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-21-2023 at 06:32 AM.

  23. #20
    Plaintiff is the government and defendant is the government. Beautiful.

  24. #21
    https://twitter.com/AGAndrewBailey/s...95481029206016


    [additional matter hidden to save space]

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey Asks Court To Block Biden From Violating Americans’ 1st Amendment Rights, Citing 1,400 Facts
    https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2023/03...ng-1-400-facts
    Missouri Attorney General (06 March 2023)

    JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - In order to protect the constitutional liberties of all Americans, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed their motion for a preliminary injunction in their landmark free speech lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden. After receiving thousands of internal federal documents, the attorneys general ask the court to block top officials in the federal government from coercing and colluding with Big tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment. The motion for preliminary injunction highlights 1,432 facts showing that top officials in the federal government are coercing and colluding with big tech social media companies to censor free speech.

    “As Attorney General, I will protect the Constitution, which includes defending the fundamental right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. The First Amendment is the cornerstone of our republic because the founders understood that the remedy to false speech has always been counter speech, not government censorship,” said Attorney General Bailey. “This case is the most important free speech lawsuit in a generation, as we highlight more than 1,400 facts showing the Biden Administration’s blatant coercion and collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with. I will not rest until the court blocks unelected bureaucrats from violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”

    “The overwhelming evidence is clear: the highest levels of our federal government are suppressing the First Amendment rights of Americans who have opposing views,” said Attorney General Landry. “This egregious and unlawful viewpoint censorship by the White House, FBI, CDC, CISA, and other agencies not only chills speech; but it also unjustly inflicts grave and irreparable injuries on citizens and states, whose duty it is to protect their fundamental rights.”

    Attorneys General Bailey and Landry establish unconscionable federal censorship activities – including, but not limited to:

    • Fauci’s involvement in laundering lies into medical journals in an attempt to bury the lab-leak theory (to save himself from embarrassment given that he had been involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses).
    • White House officials like Rob Flaherty, Andrew Slavitt, and Jennifer Psaki have engaged in a relentless pressure campaign, both in public and in private, to coerce platforms into censoring disfavored viewpoints on social media.
    • Surgeon General Murthy and his staff coordinate closely with the White House in this pressure campaign, causing social-media platforms to scramble and assure federal officials that “we hear your call to do more” to censor disfavored viewpoints.
    • The CDC flags specific social-media posts for censorship, organizes “BOLO” (“Be On the Lookout”) meetings to tell platforms what should be censored, and serves as the definitive fact-checker with final authority to dictate exactly what speech will be removed from social media.
    • Dr. Fauci orchestrated an elaborate campaign of trickery and deception to induce social-media platforms to censor the lab-leak theory and other viewpoints he disfavors.
    • The FBI, likewise, deliberately planted false information about “hack-and-leak” operations to deceive social-media platforms into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
    • The FBI, CISA, and the GEC collude with social-media platforms in hundreds of meetings about misinformation, and those agencies repeatedly flag huge quantities of First Amendment-protected speech to compliant platforms for censorship.
    • CISA “switchboards” reports of so-called “misinformation” from state and local governments to platforms for censorship.
    • CISA and the GEC are pervasively intertwined with massive government-private censorship enterprises like the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration among government, social-media platforms, and activist nonprofits to monitor, track, and censor enormous volumes of Americans’ speech on social media.
    • Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, and HHS collaborate in a similar censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.

    “Altogether, these censorship activities by federal officials and agencies constitute a gargantuan federal “Censorship Enterprise.” This enterprise is highly effective—it has stifled debate and criticism of government policy on social media about some of the most pressing issues of our time. And its activities are flagrantly unconstitutional,” noted Attorneys General Bailey and Landry in their request of the Court to stop to these egregious violations of the First Amendment.

    Missouri v. Biden was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana on May 5, 2022. They filed for a motion for discovery on June 17, 2022, and that motion was granted on July 12, 2022, clearing the way for Missouri and Louisiana to gather discovery and documents from the Biden Administration and social media companies.

    Missouri and Louisiana deposed top-ranking officials in the federal government under oath, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, Eric Waldo of the Surgeon General’s Office, Carol Crawford of the CDC, Brian Scully of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Daniel Kimmage of the State Department.

    The motion for preliminary injunction can be read here: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-sour...rsn=3d465d71_2

    The proposed findings of fact in support of their motion for preliminary injunction can be read here: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-sour...rsn=739f8cbf_2
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 03-08-2023 at 11:01 PM.

  25. #22
    https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/statu...05263299559424


    [additonal matter hidden to save space]
     

    https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/statu...04249744171015


    The Most Important Civil Liberties Case of Our Time: A Critical Juncture
    https://rumble.com/v2c93q8-the-most-...-juncture.html
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 03-08-2023 at 10:52 PM.

  26. #23

  27. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    TWITTER FILES #19
    The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
    Matt Taibbi (17 March 2023)

    [...]

    https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729265122168835


    [...]
    //



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  29. #25
    Eric Schmitt (now a U.S. Senator) was the Missouri AG who, with Louisiana AG Jeff Landry, initiated the suit against the Biden administration.

    https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/...58410792054786

  30. #26

  31. #27
    Awesome! I hope this leads to impeachment hearings.
    9/11 Thermate experiments

    Winston Churchhill on why the U.S. should have stayed OUT of World War I

    "I am so %^&*^ sick of this cult of Ron Paul. The Paulites. What is with these %^&*^ people? Why are there so many of them?" YouTube rant by "TheAmazingAtheist"

    "We as a country have lost faith and confidence in freedom." -- Ron Paul

    "It can be a challenge to follow the pronouncements of President Trump, as he often seems to change his position on any number of items from week to week, or from day to day, or even from minute to minute." -- Ron Paul
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No need to make it a superhighway.
    Quote Originally Posted by osan View Post
    The only way I see Trump as likely to affect any real change would be through martial law, and that has zero chances of success without strong buy-in by the JCS at the very minimum.

  32. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    TWITTER FILES #20
    Berenson v. Twitter
    Alex Berenson (01 June 2023)

    [...]

    https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/sta...36817913581569


    [...]
    //

  33. #29
    h/t @Brian4Liberty: Judge Bars Biden Officials, Agencies From Contacting Social Media Companies

    Link to ruling (PDF file): MEMORANDUM RULING ON REQUEST FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

    "Orwellian Ministry Of Truth" Busted - Judge Bars Biden Officials, Agencies From Contacting Social Media Companies
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...edia-companies
    Tyler Durden (05 July 2023)

    [all emphasis in the original - OB]

    In an order fittingly issued on Independence Day, a federal judge in Louisiana has forbidden multiple federal agencies and named officials from having any contact with social media companies with the intent to moderate content.

    The preliminary injunction arises from a suit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with individuals that include two leading critics of the Covid-19 lockdown regime -- Harvard's Martin Kulldorff and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya -- and Jim Hoft, who owns the right-wing website Gateway Pundit.

    “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote US District Judge Terry A. Doughty. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
    The dozens of people and agencies bound by the injunction include President Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, the Treasury Department, State Department, the US Election Assistance Commission, the FBI and entire Justice Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, who are among the originators of the Great Barrington Declaration that denounced the lockdown regime, have been victims of social media censorship. For example, the pair says their censorship-triggering statements included assertions that "thinking everyone must be vaccinated is scientifically flawed," questioning the value of masks, and stating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine immunity.

    While the case is dominated by Covid-19 censorship, it also encompasses the Justice Department's efforts to suppress reporting about Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" in the run-up to the 2020 election. Doughty gave credence to that accusation.

    The injunction represents a major validation of accusations that government officials have colluded with social media platforms to suppress speech that counters official narratives, with the restraints falling almost exclusively on conservative viewpoints.

    "The evidence thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario," wrote Doughty in a 155-page ruling. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'".

    "The White House defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified," wrote Doughty. "Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied."

    Doughty quoted communications from administration officials to social media company employees, saying they represent "examples of coercion exercised by the White House defendants." Here's a small sampling:

    • "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.”
    • To Facebook: “Are you guys $#@!ing serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
    • “This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH”
    • “Hey folks, wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed. ASAP

    The judge noted that the badgering came simultaneous with threats of changing the social media regulation scheme, and that those threats had extra credibility since they came as the Democrats controlled the White House and Congress.

    The accusation that the social media platforms and government were acting in concert is substantiated by the communication and bureaucracy that surrounded the endeavor. "Many emails between the White House and social-media companies referred to themselves as 'partners.' Twitter even sent the White House a 'Partner Support Portal' for expedited review of the White House’s requests," wrote Doughty, a 2017 Trump nominee.

    A long list of agencies and people are now barred from contacting social media platforms with “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

    "If there is a bedrock principal underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable," wrote Doughty.

  34. #30

    https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/...63278775291915
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

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