- Conservatives rejoiced on Tuesday following a court order restraining government agencies from colluding with tech companies to censor online speech, but the scope of the injunction is broader than initially portrayed.
- The injunction restricts the Biden administration from coordination not only with social media companies but also with nonprofit organizations that support censorship.
- The court determined that government officials likely violated the First Amendment by suppressing protected speech and the order states that government actors are barred from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” research groups and projects that advocate for censorship.
Conservatives celebrated Tuesday after a federal judge issued an injunction against government agencies collaborating with tech companies to censor online speech, but the order is even more far-reaching than first reported.
Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty granted the broad injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from collusion with pro-censorship nonprofit organizations, in addition to social media companies, in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden. The injunction found that government officials likely violated the First Amendment by suppressing protected speech and the order states that government actors are barred from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” research groups and projects that advocate for censorship.
Specifically, the order calls out the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project and the Stanford Internet Observatory and it prevents the government from engaging with them and other groups and projects “for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech.”
Researchers including Stanford Internet Observatory, election officials and government agencies established the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020 to identify and study online misinformation in the lead-up to elections, flagging posts for social media platforms to censor.
Through the EIP, multiple groups, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, could submit “tickets” reporting possible election misinformation, which EIP would then forward to social media platforms after looking into the claims. The EIP published a 2021 reportdetailing its efforts to address misinformation in the 2020 election, disclosing it had shared hundreds of posts with online platforms, with “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube […] either labeled, removed, or soft blocked.”
The Virality Project was a group of academic institutions led by Stanford University that advocated for stricter censorship on Twitter. It worked with government agencies to categorize often-correct statements as “misinformation,” according to emails published by journalist Matt Taibbi in a batch of “Twitter Files.”
The Virality Project helped launch a system that flagged millions of posts per day as misinformation for review, according to emails. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, State Department and the Pentagon partnered with the Virality Project either directly or using intermediary groups.
Concerns over vaccine passport programs were flagged despite not being false. Opposition to those policies “have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms,” Virality Project said, flagging it as a “misinformation event.”
Doughty found that plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, had presented “evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
The order also bars “Specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
A House Judiciary Committee report found the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA used private surrogates to suppress speech during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, during the 2020 election, CISA facilitated “switchboards” enabling state and local election officials to flag perceived misinformation for social media platforms to censor.
Further, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit that pushes platforms to censor, worked with election officials and CISA on a “portal” to flag and censor social media “misinformation,” according to a CIS report independent journalist Lee Fang obtained in June.
The injunction allows for certain collaborative actions, such as informing social media companies of illegal posting. An example is “informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies.”
The Biden administration appealed the injunction on Wednesday.
The White House and Stanford Internet Observatory did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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