AG's sue Biden over speech suppression

 Jazz Shaw:

The fact that the major social media platforms have had their thumbs on the scales in favor of liberal and Democratic causes has long been obvious to far more people than just Elon Musk. This has generally been attributed to the decidedly liberal bent in the leadership of those companies and the people they install to censor unapproved views. But have liberals in the federal government, specifically at the White House, been actively involved in those efforts to block speech under the guise of “fighting disinformation?” That’s the assertion of the Attorneys General from Louisiana and Missouri. They have jointly filed a suit against the Biden administration, claiming that Biden’s team has been working directly with Big Tech going back to the early days of the 2020 election, pressuring Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others to take down dissenting opinions. (Washington Examiner)

The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accused President Joe Biden and other top government officials in a lawsuit Thursday of colluding with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress speech under the guise of combating dangerous misinformation.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed the suit in an attempt to demonstrate the Biden administration’s alleged work with Big Tech companies to suppress speech pertaining to COVID-19-related information, election integrity, and other topics unfairly.

The lawsuit claims that Biden and his supporters, during the 2020 election campaign and now in office, have directly worked with executives and employees of Big Tech companies to censor content related to controversial political debates over the past two years.

The suit specifically calls out Joe Biden personally, along with Jen Psaki and others, accusing them of collusion with the Big Tech oligarchs to suppress speech. As evidence, they point to emails exchanged between Anthony Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg regarding the dissemination of “disinformation” about COVID-19 on Facebook. Also mentioned are direct calls from Psaki while standing at the White House briefing lectern directed at the leaders of social media platforms, calling on them to do more to “combat disinformation.”

This is a serious accusation. The problem with doing something about big tech platforms censoring people’s views is that they are private companies and can largely do what they like. You can’t do very much about it unless you happen to have a spare $47 billion lying around to buy the company and change the policies yourself.

But if the federal government can be shown to have directly intervened to make that happen, it’s a violation of the First Amendment rights of all of the users of these platforms. It could easily be viewed as grounds for impeachment, assuming you could find the will among anyone in the swamp these days to impeach anyone not named “Trump.”

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There is a big difference between expressing their views from a podium in the White House and calling a social media company and telling them to suppress someone else's speech.  If they did that to the NY Times or the Washington Post there would be a huge outcry.  Calls to "combat disinformation" are not the same as telling the media they disagree with what is being said on social media.