The Supreme Court has been urged by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) to uphold a preliminary injunction against members of the federal bureaucracy, an important ruling intended to guard freedom of speech amidst a concerning surge in government-imposed social media censorship.
The injunction in question, originating from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the landmark case of Missouri v. Biden, prohibits officials from entities like the White House, the US Surgeon General’s office, the CDC, and the FBI from leveraging their influence over social media platforms to suppress constitutionally safeguarded speech. The Biden administration, unconvinced by the ruling, subsequently presented a request to the nation’s highest court for a stay on its enforcement.
This injunction has been seen as a triumph for a number of NCLA’s clients who have been victims of social media censorship, including Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty, alongside Jill Hines. All have suffered blatant social media suppression tactics such as shadow-banning, throttling, de-boosting, and outright censorship, purportedly spearheaded by figures from the Surgeon General and CDC, among other Biden Administration officials.
These censorship activities, designed to suppress dissenting voices regarding issues such as natural immunity to Covid-19, the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate effectiveness, have thus far been free of successful counter arguments from the government.
Although the social media platforms’ content moderation policies themselves were not under scrutiny by the plaintiffs, the NCLA did take issue with the government’s illicit attempts to sway the application of these policies. This, they claim, seriously infringed on the rights of their clients to express their diverse opinions in public and denied the American public their right to access differing points of view. US District Judge Terry Doughty made a compelling point in this regard, describing the government’s actions as “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” and likening it to the notorious Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel for NCLA, expressed confidence that “the Court will recognize this and uphold the lower courts’ injunction,” having observed the federal administration’s consistent failures, while NCLA’s President and General Counsel, Mark Chenoweth, voiced a fervent critique of the administration’s censorship, saying it was absolutely unacceptable.
