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Attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana filed a motion for preliminary injunction this week demanding a court stop Big Tech companies from colluding with the federal government to inform their political censorship sprees, after the White House has repeatedly bragged about exploiting its relationships with social media companies to suppress information the Biden administration deems “problematic.”
In the motion, Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry argue that the Biden administration, in partnership with Meta (formerly Facebook), Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and other Silicon Valley giants, has taken advantage of Big Tech’s grip on the social media platform market to suppress any speech contrary to their chosen narrative
“Freedom of speech is the very bedrock of this great nation, and needs to be protected and preserved. The federal government’s alleged attempts to collude with social media companies to censor free speech should terrify Missourians and Americans alike,” Schmitt said in a statement. “The federal government must be halted from silencing any more Americans, and this motion for preliminary injunction intends to do just that.”
The fed-inspired decision to “shadow-ban, de-platform, de-monetize, de-boost, restrict content access, and suspend many speakers, both temporarily and permanently,” a press release announcing the motion states, has silenced people “from doctors and scientists, to the owner of a conservative radio show, to everyday Americans who dare to voice their opinion in the public sphere.”
As noted by the state attorneys, it was during the height of the government’s panic over Covid-19 that Big Tech censored the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration who criticized the bureaucrats calling for continuous national lockdowns. The “extensive social-media censorship on multiple platforms” endured by authors such as Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya came shortly after emails between then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci demanding a “quick and devastating … takedown” of the group’s criticism.
The motion follows a complaint from the state attorneys last month against the Biden administration and other federal officials for engaging in “open and explicit censorship programs” such as the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board.”
“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” the original petition states.