Freedom of expression against misinformation reaches fever pitch

“I don’t get involved in social media in any way,” he said. ” I do not have an account. I don’t tweet, I don’t Facebook and I don’t pay attention to that.

In addition to the states of Missouri and Louisiana, the plaintiffs include two prominent epidemiologists who have questioned the government’s handling of the pandemic, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry fired by the University of California at Irvine, for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid; Jill Hines, director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization accused of disinformation; and Jim Hoft, the founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that claims in its promotions that “for 15 years we’ve been fighting Big Tech and leftists who want to silence us.”

Jenin Younes, a lawyer for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization representing individual plaintiffs, said the government had sought to circumvent free speech rights by forcing private companies to take action against speech otherwise protected by the Constitution.

“He can’t use third parties to do what he can’t do,” she said in an interview at the organization’s Washington office.

There is no doubt that the Biden administration used the bully pulpit on a number of issues, including urging Americans to get vaccinated and calling on platforms to restrict accounts that sought to deter them.

The legal challenge for plaintiffs is to show that the government has used its legal or regulatory power to punish companies when they have failed to comply, which they often have not.

“No it’s not doable / we don’t,” a Twitter official wrote, according to A Twitter files, after Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who led the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, urged the company to remove accounts displaying information about committee staffers.