As swiftly as the pandemic – and more importantly, associated radical restrictive measures concerning people’s everyday lives – descended onto the world, it all seemingly quickly vanished into thin air.
But the consequences, particularly related to the stifling of speech, live on in a number of legal battles being fought now to prove that both government(s) and social media were wrong to introduce mass censorship because of alleged Covid misinformation.
In the US, this is happening specifically on the grounds that the First Amendment protections got breached in the process.
Now the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) has gotten involved in one of these cases by asking the Supreme Court to make a decision in the Changizi, Senger, and Kotzin v. HHS (United States Department of Health and Human Services) lawsuit.
We obtained a copy of the petition for you here.
The plaintiffs here claim that their First Amendment rights were violated by the HHS and the US surgeon general – government agencies – going to then Twitter, a private tech company, with the “request” to have their voices silenced for opposing government’s Covid mandates of the era.
Before it reached the Supreme Court, the case got into something of a “legal limbo” NCLA believes, saying there was effectively a split decision between “the Fifth and Sixth Circuits on what plaintiffs must show to satisfy Article III standing in censorship cases against the government.”
(The “split” here refers to the Fifth Circuit’s preliminary injunction in Murthy v. Missouri.)
Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs had no leg to stand on in Changizi v. HHS, trying to fight government-imposed censorship they experienced on social media – and dismissed their claims.
However, the criticism of the Covid mandates the three have expressed online is said by their defenders to have been “reasoned” – in other words, not some sensationalist fringe theory.
But that made no deference since the Big Tech’s all-powerful social media still “deplatformed” them.
Now, in light of the discovery process in a major, related in context, case deliberated by the Supreme Court – Murthy v. Missouri, NCLA believes that there is reason to review Cingazi et al v. HHS as well, specifically, to ascertain if the district court (later supported by the Sixth Circuit) was right to dismiss the case without allowing discovery.
And what NCLA has been presenting to the Supreme Court in the Murthy v. Missouri case is that “the government browbeat social media companies into censoring Covid-19 views of which the government did not approve.”
