Oral arguments were heard today in the appeal of the government against the states of Louisiana, Missouri and seven plaintiffs who claim that Biden officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media platforms to suppress or delete content about COVID-19 that federal officials found objectionable.
The Biden administration had an extensive communication pipeline into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube and various subsidiary tech companies where instructions, the government says “encouragement”, were/was given about the removal of content critical of the government position, and the removal of content providers – American citizens. Full Hearing Audio:
Making the case for the Biden administration, Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher led the way. “We don’t think it’s possible for the government — through speech alone — to transform private speakers into state actors,” he said.
Fletcher said the government didn’t engage in coercion — which he said would be unconstitutional — just encouragement and persuasion for the social media platforms to enforce their existing rules at the time barring Covid-19 misinformation. “If it stays on the persuasion side of the line — and all we’re talking about is government speech — then there’s no state action and there’s also no First Amendment problem,” he said. “I think it’s clear this is exhortation, not threat.”
Louisiana state Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, arguing for the plaintiffs, said the speech the platforms were suppressing wasn’t their own speech but those of third parties, ordinary Americans. Aguiñaga also said the users often had no idea they were being impacted by the federal effort to prod the platforms to take down content. “The bulk of it is behind closed doors. That is what is so pernicious about it,” he said.
The questioning by the majority of the Supreme Court justices appeared to favor the government, in large part due to the inability of the plaintiffs to outline direct actionable harm to them as an outcome of the regulation of their speech by the tech platforms. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in the case by late June.
their job is not to protect our freedoms
and our constitution, etc.
but to protect government
that has been obvious at least since
John Roberts declared Obamacare a tax
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution
is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects
the right of the people to Religion and Expression.
As ratified by the States:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
GOOD NEWS:
Ace: Supreme Court Lifts Stay on Enforcement of Texas Law Criminalizing Illegal Border-Crossing:
“The Texas law makes violation of the country’s immigration laws a felony, and authorizes Texas state personnel to arrest border-jumpers and sentence them to jail.
The law had been stayed — blocked from taking effect — as a lawsuit challenging it works its way through the courts.
The Supreme Court had issued a stay, but now, by a 6-3 majority, cancels that stay and allows the law to be enforced.(Link)
Note the case has not been decided yet. This is about whether the law will be blocked from operating or allowed to operate before the case is decided.
There’s a tangly history here: the lower court, presided over by a Hawaiian judge, ruled the law unconstitutional, but then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that judge. Biden appealed to the Supreme Court.
EVERYTHING the federal government does is coercive! They own all the big-guns and badges and jails. They make the rules and regulations. They impose taxes and fees. A government is a government because it exercises a monopoly on violence.
Or would exercise a monopoly on violence if they could.
Praise God for giving our Founders the mistrust of absolute power, so that they enshrined our God given right to self defense in the Second Amendment!
Counsel for plaintiffs/respondents appeared unprepared. He seemed not to understand several of the questions asked by the justices.
His default answer to several tough questions was that the acts are clearly in violation of the first amendment, but the court was focused more on the evidentiary burden of proof and the degree of relative harm necessary to prevail.
I was disappointed. I expected much more.
They couldn’t be bothered to hire a decent Anger Manager to act the Plaintiff. Says a lot.
Not meant to go anywhere.
This case with its low budget Anger Mgr to play the Plaintiff seems to just be a Test Balloon.
Gauging American belief, disgust, strength, apathy, boredom, who knows.
Every American was touched by covid in a way that has yet to be admitted by the govt in general ie the Supreme Court. Meanwhile even SNL did a skit saying the precautions were stupid and didn’t work. Only a weirdo wears a mask driving alone in their car anymore. Can the government ie the SC keep lying to Americans, that’s the test.
The solicitor General should be asked, Is the FBI or DOJ contacting the social media companies “speech alone”? Are these offices “speech” offices? Is there a “speech” office that has the ability to engage in speech with the companies without an implicit threat of legal action? Lying is a form of speech protected by the 1st amendment, do social media companies or the users of their services have the ability to lie to the FBI or DOJ? If they can’t lie to the FBI or DOJ without threat of arrest are these agencies ever using “speech alone”?
Another key issue not addressed: Automation.
One of the great problems is automated censorship. Automated censorship is unmanaged censorship; arbitrarily and capricious censorship; machine censorship. There is no human thought or intervention, just prejudice and supposition without fact of wrongdoing that is operated by a machine.
Shall we automate all policing? Shall we automate all court proceedings? Is any automation of due process a cancelation or violation of due process?
Shall citizens be arrested and incarcerated based solely upon a machine interpretation? Doing this to everyone does not make it equal protection, does it?
Look at the money that could be saved. We just use AI to censor the behavior of people because a computer applies a bot-form of automated censorship to automatically protect society from the probability of being violated. There is a form of lawful abandonment of due process if such is done by computer automation.
Should that be allowed?
How can I face my accuser when my accuser is a non-human alien person? How do I confront my accuser when there is no human person accuser and my accuser is an automated non-human person machine?
Most all this social media censorship is done by bot. Further, there is the problem unequal and uneven enforcement as automation sees some and does not see others; automation fails to be human, fails to see reasonable human context and fails to reasonably see human context.
One should think the automation of accusation/determination of thought and speech crimes is the absolute worst place to remove the unique role of human-human determination. I do not see how the Constitutional allows due process to be administered by fiat of machine automation either to administrate the denial, usurpation or suspension of an enumerated right or automate the administration of such denials.