The Thought Police

Federal Court Decision Uncovers the Most Massive Censorship Campaign in US History

On Independence Day (fittingly enough) Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District Court issued a temporary injunction in the case of Missouri v Biden, the lawsuit filed to counter the most massive attack on free speech in United States history.

The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana along with five private citizens: Aaron Kheriarty, former Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Ethics at the University of California Irvine and current Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute; Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford; Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard; Jim Hoft, founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Gateway Pundit; and Jill Hines, Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana. The defendants include President Joe Biden along with a long list of govt officials and agencies.

The suit alleges that the defendants have conspired and colluded with social media companies to suppress free speech on a variety of social media platforms. The initial process of discovery has uncovered a censorship campaign of truly mind-blowing proportions, involving the White House, the Department of State, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the US Election Assistance Commission, the Census Bureau, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and the CDC, targeting all of the most prominent social media platforms: Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Instagram, Nextdoor, LinkedIn, Reddit, Discord, and Pinterest.

The censorship campaign initially targeted disfavored viewpoints regarding election integrity and official responses to the covid pandemic – the mRNA “vaccines,” masks, lockdowns, anti-social distancing, and safe and effective early-stage remedies for covid. But, as anyone with two adjacent brain cells would have predicted, it soon extended to a variety of other topics, including race relations, border security, economic policy, the Second Amendment, the war in Ukraine, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, gas prices, climate change, and “gender-affirming care” – the list goes on and on, encompassing just about every significant issue of the day.

The exceptions to the First Amendment – libel, child pornography, and so forth – are well known and need no further elaboration here. None of these exceptions apply to this case.

The defendants have claimed they are protecting the public from misinformation and disinformation. But the First Amendment does not make an exception for “disinformation,” nor does it empower the government to decide what disinformation is. Even demonstrably false statements fall under the category of protected speech.

And govt censors did not stop at demonstrably false information, but have taken it upon themselves to suppress any speech that could conceivably “amplify vaccine hesitancy” – a category so broad it could involve any discussion of the harms or lack of efficacy of anything called a “vaccine.” One govt official demanded to know how Facebook handles claims that are “dubious” but not “provably false,” while Facebook assured govt censors it was exploring ways to prevent posts discouraging vaccines from going viral, even though those posts did not violate any of Facebook’s policies.

In addition, the censors have suppressed information they have judged to be “lacking context.” But since “context” is subjective and potentially limitless, they have extended their brief to banning any inconvenient truth.

Under the lash of the aforementioned govt agencies, the social media companies have demonetized YouTube channels, demoted or de-boosted content and preventied the sharing of posts (making it harder for other users to find them and thus defeating the purpose of being on the platform in the first place), removed posts expressing disfavored viewpoints, and canceled social media accounts of individuals accused of purveying “disinformation.”

During one meeting with Twitter representatives, govt officials demanded to know why former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson hadn’t been “kicked off” the site. Three months later, Berenson’s Twitter account was suspended, and a month after that he was permanently barred from the platform.

The defendants in the case are claiming they haven’t censored anyone, on the grounds that the aforementioned actions were performed by the social media companies themselves. But the law does not require outright coercion on the part of the govt for suppression of disfavored viewpoints to be considered censorship – only that the govt be “pervasively intertwined” with the organizations doing the censoring.

And they are. Twitter has set up a Partner Support Portal for the convenience of govt censors, while the White House has insisted that Facebook produce periodic COVID-19 insight report to track “misinformation” and demanded to know how that platform intended to push FDA approval of the Pfizer shot. Officials messaged social media companies and met with them to pressure them to remove, reduce, and suppress free speech. They flagged posts they disapproved of, and demanded to know what the companies were doing to suppress that kind of speech on their platforms.

In addition to embedding themselves with the social media companies, the govt censors have worked to create a variety of quasi-official organizations such as the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and the Election Integrity Partnership to outsource their dirty work for them. Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and one of the founders of the EIP, stated the organization was founded to “get around unclear legal authorities, including very real First Amendment questions” that would arise in the course of official censorship efforts.

And the claim that govt agencies were merely “encouraging” social media companies to suppress disfavored content is belied by the bossy, bullying language officials used in communication with the companies. On 16 July 2021, after President Biden famously accused social media companies of “killing people” and proclaimed “The only pandemic we have here is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” his Press Secretary Jen Psaki raised the specter of “legal consequences” if the companies did not censor “misinformation” more aggressively, adding “The President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections.”

Some more samples of threatening language govt officials used in communicating with the social media companies that were revealed in the process of discovery follow:

• You are hiding the ball.

• I’ve been asking you guys pretty directly, over a series of conversations, for a clear accounting of the biggest issues you are seeing on your platform when it comes to vaccine hesitancy.

• Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.

• Vaccine hesitancy is a concern. That concern has been shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the White House.

• Not to sound like a broken record, but how much content is being demoted, and how effective are you at mitigating reach, and how quickly?

• I am not trying to play “gotcha” with you. We are gravely concerned that your server is one of the biggest drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period. I will also be the first to acknowledge that borderline content offers no easy solutions. But we want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on. This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.  

The remark about “borderline content” makes clear they have stopped pretending this is about protecting us from out-and-out falsehoods (not that it is their job to “protect” us in this fashion anyway). In a similar vein, the aforementioned Virality Project targets statements that are not necessarily false, including “hard-to-verify” content,” “sensationalized/misleading headlines,” and “organized outrage.”

And of course it didn’t stop there. Facebook demoted posts suggesting natural immunity is superior to vaccine-enforced immunity, while the CDC provided that company with a list of “false claims” which included “COVID-19 vaccine weaken the immune system” and “COVID-19 vaccines cause auto-immune disease.” In fact, Pfizer’s own study showed the shot depresses the production of lymphocytes, the cells which mediate the body’s immune response, while the CDC’s own PRR analysis (which they released last January after months and months of stonewalling) showed safety signals for dozens of different categories of auto-immune-related events.

The dire warnings from govt officials are not just idle threats. The censors have held up the prospect of anti-trust action, increased regulation, and repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which shields companies from liability for statements made on their websites. Such a repeal would have the effect of transforming the social media companies from a news stand to a news magazine – in effect ending social media as we know it.

Just as revealing as the bullying, threatening language govt functionaries directed at the social media platforms are the obsequious responses provided by company officials:

• We obviously have work to do to gain your trust.

• We also are working to get you useful information that’s on the level. That’s my job and I take it seriously – I’ll continue to do it to the best of my ability, and I’ll expect you to hold me accountable.

• We have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that do not contain actionable misinformation.

• I wanted to send you a quick note on the three pieces of vaccine content that were seen by a high number of people before we demoted them. Although they don’t violate our community standards, we should have demoted them before they went viral, and this has exposed gaps in our operational and technical process.

In response to the president’s famous remark on 16 July, a Facebook official plainted “It’s not great to be accused of killing people, but as I said by email I’m keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively. I am available to meet/speak whenever suits.”

In addition, a Facebook official sent an email to a senior advisor to the President, pleading for ways “to get back into the White House’s good graces” and proclaimed Facebook and the White House were “100% on the same team in fighting this.”

In reference to reports of adverse events linked to the Johnson and Johnson vaccine (which has since been pulled from the market at the request of the CDC due to concerns about clotting-related incidents) a Facebook official wrote “Regarding the J&J news, we’re keen to amplify any messaging you want us to project.”

There’s more. In the darkest days on the pandemic, when the nation and the world were awash in fear, three eminently credentialed epidemiologists (including Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, both plaintiffs in the suit) issued a plea for a more nuanced approach in place of the sledgehammer tactics being employed. Called the Great Barrington Declaration, the missive seemed to many like a breath of fresh air in an increasingly poisonous debate.

Not everyone saw it that way. Four days after the issue of the GBD, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins emailed NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, referring to the three eminently credentialed experts as “fringe epidemiologists,” adding “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.” (Does that sound like science to you? It sounds to me like something out of gangland fiction).

Soon after that, Google de-boosted the search results for the GBD so that when users googled “Great Barrington Declaration” they were directed to articles critical of the declaration, rather than the document itself. Reddit removed links to the GBD, and Facebook and YouTube suppressed content related to the declaration as well.

The lawsuit is still in the early stages. No doubt scope and scale of the official censorship campaign will turn out to be even greater than we now know.

What is at stake here? Everything – or at least, everything we need to live together as a society of intelligent, self-governing men and women.

As Judge Doughty notes:

It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by the government itself or private licensee.

Freedom of speech and press is the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

Well said. And in the opposite corner is our Censorship-Industrial Complex, personified by CISA Director Jen Easterly, who offers these words of wisdom:

I think [it] is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.

We are in the business of protecting critical infrastructure, and the most critical is our cognitive infrastructure.

Indeed. The Cambridge Dictionary defines “cognitive” as “relating to or involving the processes of thinking and reasoning.” And with that, they have become, literally, the Thought Police.

My book The Day the Science Died: Covid Vaccines and the Power of Fear is now available on amazon.