The class-action lawsuit accusing the government of orchestrating a systemic campaign of censorship on social media has been filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his Children’s Health Defense non-profit, and Connie Sampognaro on behalf of all others in a similar position, allege that the Biden administration used pressure to make social networks owned by Big Tech carry out censorship on the government’s behalf.
According to the lawsuit, this started happening in 2020, and the filing names President Joe Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, among others, as defendants, each in their official capacity.
Read the complaint here.
The lawsuit states that the federal government, from 2020 until today, “has waged a systematic, concerted campaign, astonishing in its breadth and effectiveness, to ‘induce, encourage, promote’ the nation’s three largest social-media platforms ‘to accomplish what [the government] is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish’ – namely, the censorship of constitutionally protected speech.”
The long list of defendants includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, and the plaintiffs claim that the censorship campaign has been successful – that free speech, which should be constitutionally protected, has been targeted “on the basis of its content and viewpoint.”
The reference to the three biggest social media platforms is Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter, which are described as having greater power over the public discourse in the US than anyone else has ever had in the country’s history.
And the federal government is accused of harnessing that power through pressure, to get the companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
This situation is qualified by the plaintiffs as the gravest threat to free speech ever faced by the US, as private companies were made to “stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”
Some of the topics that irked the White House to the point of engaging in this “proxy censorship” via social media giants was discussion around the origins of Covid, but also about the suppression of legitimate news stories in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
The court is asked to rule in favor of the plaintiffs through declaratory and injunctive relief instead of awarding damages, and observers have found the lawsuit to be similar to a separate one previously filed by the attorney-generals of Missouri and Louisiana, which has recently been allowed to proceed.
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