The Biden administration has taken a tough blow in yet another attempt to obtain consent to work with social media corporations to suppress conservative content.
Judge Terry A. Doughty has denied the Biden administration’s request for a stay on his preliminary injunction, which was issued on the 4th of July, which prohibits the government from pressuring Big Tech companies into censoring speech.
In his rejection, Judge Doughty noted that he provided reasonable restrictions for when the federal government may use social media, including “to inform social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity, criminal conspiracies, national security threats,” as well as “extortion, other threats, criminal efforts to suppress voting, providing illegal campaign contributions” and “cyber-attacks against election infrastructure.”
Federal officials are not permitted to remove posts that highlighted reasonable concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections or the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccinations, as they were doing.
“Defendants cite no specific action that would be prohibited by th is Preliminary Injunction that would provide grave harm to the American people or over democratic processes,” the judge ruled.
His original order, he noted, “prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do—contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”
The legal action is a piece of a larger campaign to uncover and stop federal officials from abusing their power to silence conservative speech. The lawsuit has already produced proof of the tight ties between public servants and social media corporations.
As reported, Biden representatives and Big Tech met frequently to talk on what to suppress, according to the first set of emails made public as part of the case. One email from a Facebook employee to two Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staffers asked about setting up a monthly “misinfo/debunking” meeting “in addition to our weekly meetings.”
Facebook officials deleted a parody Fauci account on Instagram after a White House official named Clarke Humphrey issued a complaint.
Additionally, Judge Doughty earlier ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor to seek additional emails from a number of government organizations that were allegedly associated with Big Tech. “These allegedly include the State Department, the Food and Drug Administration (‘FDA’), the Census Bureau, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the U.S. Treasury Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” Doughty ruled.
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