THREAD: How the CDC Became the Speech Police
Originally Posted by
Brian4Liberty
FTA:
Originally Posted by
Brian4Liberty
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:
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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.
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