During the pandemic the Biden administration colluded with and pressured social media platforms to censor any messages which ran counter to the administration's narrative about Covid 19 and the vaccines that were being promoted by people like Anthony Fauci.
Both Missouri and Louisiana took the government to court, arguing that their role in pressuring these platforms to censor content violates the free speech protections guaranteed by the first amendment. Judge Terry Doughty, Chief U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, agreed.
A piece at PJ Media explains what happened:
In a landmark ruling in Missouri v. Biden, Doughty struck back hard against what he called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”Specifically, Doughty declared that:
Doughty even began his decision by quoting the most famous adage regarding the importance of the freedom of speech: “I may disapprove of what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it,” a statement that is often attributed to Voltaire but which Doughty credits to the early twentieth-century English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
Doughty declares that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
He noted that “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication, regarding what Defendants described as ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ have colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”
Plaintiffs allege that Defendants suppressed conservative-leaning free speech, such as: (1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns; (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President.Doughty likened the Biden administration to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” and ordered numerous top federal officials and agencies to cease all contact with social media firms that could potentially interfere with First Amendment-protected speech.
Doubtless the administration will appeal Doughty's ruling since the nation's present leadership, whose totalitarian impulses impel them to arrogate to themselves as much power over what people can say and do as they can, will seek to recoup their lost ground. It's a travesty that the folks we've elected to protect our freedoms are actually disdainful of the very freedoms they're sworn to preserve and disdainful of the Constitution which guarantees them.
This became particularly clear, as the article notes, when "the Biden regime established its ill-fated and quickly disbanded Disinformation Governance Board" whose mission was to identify “disinformation”, i.e. anything that deviated from the administration's position on an issue, "to circumvent the First Amendment and to hoodwink Americans into thinking that the crushing of dissent was a valuable service."
Kudos to Judge Doughty for actually standing against this erosion of our rights and holding the would-be censors in check.