Posted on 01/06/2024 4:02:11 AM PST by MtnClimber
This spring, the Supreme Court will review the federal government’s alleged efforts to pressure social media companies to censor protected speech.
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed a split between those who believe that the government has broad authority to control every aspect of the economy and society in the name of the public good, and those who believe that such intrusions are beyond the government’s constitutional authority. A pending case gives the U.S. Supreme Court the opportunity to decide whether the purported need to protect public health can trump the First Amendment.
The Court granted certiorari to hear an appeal of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which prohibited federal health and other officials from communicating with social media platforms about removing posts that the government identifies as false or misleading. The appellate court found evidence of “a coordinated campaign” of unprecedented “magnitude orchestrated by federal officials” to suppress disfavored, generally conservative, points of view on social media. It held that “the district court was correct in its assessment—‘unrelenting pressure’ from certain government officials likely ‘had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.’”
The alleged censorship reviewed by the court covered several topics but mostly related to supposed Covid-19 “misinformation”—including opposition to Covid masking and lockdowns, the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and questioning the need for universal Covid vaccination.
Two of the private plaintiffs, infectious-disease epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, were among the suit’s alleged victims. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, which expressed concern about the damaging physical- and mental-health impacts of Covid lockdowns and proposed the alternative approach of “focused protection” of vulnerable groups. In court, the two scientists provided convincing evidence that Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health conspired to organize, as Collins advocated in an email to Fauci, “a quick and devastating published take down” of the GBD and its authors, and that other NIH personnel directly contacted social media companies, resulting in the censorship of the GBD and its authors.
Their claim was bolstered by emails obtained by Reason, which revealed that officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Biden administration interacted almost daily with Twitter and Facebook in an often successful attempt to influence online content about the pandemic. Pronouncements by administration officials—including President Biden, who accused social media companies of killing people with misinformation—carried the implied threat that firms would suffer if they didn’t censor government-designated misinformation.
While they warned against supposed misinformation, Fauci and Collins and CDC officials were supporting lockdown measures that had no evidentiary basis, either before or during the pandemic. An empirical analysis that I coauthored found no significant connection between the severity of states’ lockdown measures and their health outcomes. States that imposed more severe lockdowns, however, had far worse economic and education outcomes. Lockdowns were associated with increased non-Covid-related deaths and poorer mental health.
In fact, many CDC communications were themselves misinformation. A report that I coauthored for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I am a senior fellow) and the Paragon Health Institute (where I direct the institute’s public health initiative) found that the CDC presented incomplete and inconclusive data as scientific fact. It relied on faulty science to advance damaging guidance on social distancing, masking, and school closures, and maintained arbitrary, overly cautious guidelines long after published evidence made clear that those guidelines were unnecessary and harmful.
Without clear judicial direction to stop, the government seems poised to continue its censorship efforts. A Food and Drug Administration–commissioned report by the nonprofit Reagan–Udall Foundation advised the agency to engage in “pre-bunking” of misinformation (“false, misleading, or inaccurate information that is shared unintentionally or intentionally”) and of disinformation (“deliberate dissemination of false, misleading, or inaccurate information to discredit a person or organization”). One prominent study defined pre-bunking as a strategy to “preemptively build resilience against anticipated exposure to misinformation.”
Future censorship efforts will likely be partisan. A Pew Research Center survey found that support for government restricting false information online, even if it limits freedom of information, has risen from 39 percent of American adults in 2018 to 55 percent in 2023. Yet, this increase is almost entirely a partisan phenomenon: while there was little difference between the parties in their support for this view in 2018, the share of Democrats who think that the government should suppress false information jumped from 40 percent in 2018 to 70 percent in 2023, while the percentage of Republicans supporting government censorship was almost unchanged (37 percent to 39 percent).
The Supreme Court will hear the case early this year, though the justices are unlikely to issue a decision before the spring. Meantime, the Court has stayed the lower court’s injunction prohibiting federal officials from “coerc[ing]” social media companies to engage in censorship or “meaningfully” controlling companies’ content-moderation decisions. A decision barring government-sponsored censorship cannot come soon enough.
Joel Zinberg is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, director of the Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well Being Initiative, and an associate clinical professor of surgery at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
The Supreme Court cannot retrieve the lost years that everyone suffered through.
Sounds like the U.S. civil war all over again.
Search for: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation
It reveals how totally insane and subversive the Fed Gov is in relation to “Free Speech” and independence of thought.
Look at the institutions who are Open Liars and look at the institutions who seek to destroy the US Constitution and erase every trace of our founding history.
https://www.cisa.gov
https://guides.iona.edu
https://www.psychologytoday.com
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
https://www.forbes.com
https://www.apa.org
https://sps.columbia.edu
https://libguides.pace.edu
https://guides.emich.edu
https://en.wikipedia.org
https://www.unhcr.org
https://www.apa.org
https://minitex.umn.edu
https://www.harvard.edu
https://www.konsyse.com
https://theconversation.com
https://guides.library.jhu.edu
https://libguides.ccga.edu
https://www.rd.com
https://www.theguardian.com
https://apnews.com
https://news.berkeley.edu
https://theconversation.com
https://www.bbc.co.uk
https://www.dictionary.com
https://www.cbsnews.com
https://www.nytimes.com
https://guides.lib.uw.edu
https://www.dhs.gov
https://wisconsinwatch.org
https://en.unesco.org
https://theintercept.com
https://guides.temple.edu
https://www.thefire.org
https://www.oig.dhs.gov
https://www.undp.org
https://www.nytimes.com
https://www.npr.org
https://www.mentalfloss.com
https://reason.com
https://www.csis.org
https://libguides.umn.edu
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com
https://libguides.pace.edu
https://www.businessinsider.com
https://www.nlc.org
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
https://www.nationalacademies.org
https://www.psychologytoday.com
https://news.stanford.edu
https://www.brookings.edu
https://www.cbc.ca
https://www.canada.ca
https://guides.lib.uw.edu
1st Critical of Government abuse of information in the search
https://judiciary.house.gov
THE WEAPONIZATION OF CISA: HOW A “CYBERSECURITY” AGENCY COLLUDED WITH BIG TECH AND “DISINFORMATION” PARTNERS TO CENSOR AMERICANS
“Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government U.S. House of Representatives (June 26, 2023)
and the Government propaganda list goes on and on and on. Mass Propaganda.
Obozo made it legal to outright lie to the public in the USA.
The search results never returns anything critical of the Lies and Disinformation the Fed Gov has propagated in the past 10 years.
Now, what use is the results of such a search? How about following the money?
Look at each of the entries and find out what government agency paid them to put out garbage supporting back Fed Gov policy.
That's not the end of their reach. We still have several of those CDC scumbags posting right here.
I tried to tell people
No, it cannot. However, corrupt, tyrannical criminals in government can, and did, and will, until they are defeated.
.
Yet another good reason to support the CEI.
All the statements directly concern COVID 19, but they equally apply to the Great CO2 Global Warming government-academic propaganda machine.
Political censorship is a crime against humanity.
So are Nuremberg Code violations with the jab.
During Covid the evil ones had a twofer.
Don’t forget the LQBTXYZ666 propaganda and censorship—or the censorship banning the term “illegal aliens”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.