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Censorship Industrial Complex

Kennedy, CHD win injunction in landmark censorship case against Biden administration

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11 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

The court recognized that the “right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right that is vital to the freedom of our nation, and the Kennedy plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”

A federal judge on Wednesday handed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) a partial win in their landmark censorship case alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to unlawfully censor online content.

Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content.

However, Judge Doughty simultaneously issued a stay on the injunction until 10 days after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a similar case, Murthy v. Missouri.

That case, filed in May 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs, was originally filed as Missouri v. Biden.

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on March 18 on a preliminary injunction in Murthy v. Missouri.

Mary Holland, CHD president, told The Defender that the Valentine’s Day ruling was “a welcome Valentine to the Kennedy plaintiffs,” and “an important victory for the U.S. Constitution.”

She added:

“In a thorough decision, Judge Doughty reasoned that the plaintiffs do have ‘standing’ or the right to sue and be heard; that the defendants have engaged in coercion or significant encouragement to censorship and joint action with social media platforms; and that the court is required to issue the preliminary injunction.

“Further, because it is well-established that violations of free speech rights constitute irreparable injury, the Court acted even before an ultimate decision from the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. Judge Doughty wrote: ‘This Court … finds the balance of equities and the public interest strongly favors the issue of a preliminary injunction.’

“No doubt the Supreme Court will take account of this ruling as it hears oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri on March 18.”

The suit was filed on behalf of the more than 80% of Americans who access news through social media.

Judge Doughty consolidated Kennedy v. Biden and Murthy v. Biden in July 2023. Both cases were being argued in his court and had the same defendants and many common legal and factual issues.

Although the cases were consolidated, Doughty ruled that the District Court continues to have jurisdiction over Kennedy and CHD’s separate motion for a preliminary injunction, underscoring the fact that a delayed ruling would delay Kennedy from vindicating his claims.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.

‘The right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right’

In his 24-page ruling, Judge Doughty found that several of the defendants in the Kennedy et al. v. Biden lawsuit were violating the plaintiffs’ free speech rights under the First Amendment, causing irreparable harm. He ordered them to cease these violations.

The court recognized that the “right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right that is vital to the freedom of our nation, and the Kennedy plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”

Plaintiffs alleged Biden administration officials “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

The government, the lawsuit alleges, pressured social media platforms to directly suppress or censor Kennedy and CHD from major platforms and to do the same to content containing views about COVID-19 and other issues that contradicted the government narrative.

Kennedy and CHD argued the court should rule on the preliminary injunction now, because the case is different from Murthy v. Missouri, asks for a more specific injunction and because the defendants singled out Kennedy, who is a U.S. presidential candidate, for censorship.

In determining the merits of the plaintiffs’ motion, Doughty first had to rule on whether the plaintiffs had standing. On that issue, “the court provided strong concrete examples of government coercion or encouragement to censor, particularly with respect to Mr. Kennedy and CHD,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel.

Doughty cited evidence that defendants labeled Kennedy as part of the “Disinformation Dozen” who were eventually censored from social media and that some of CHD’s social media posts were also censored.

He also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked with the Virality Project to reduce or delete social media posts by people and organizations they believed to be spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19.

The Virality Project explicitly listed Kennedy and CHD in the fifth and second place as the highest performing weekly social-media engagement incidents, he wrote.

“This evidence also was key in the Court’s decision that plaintiffs met all the requirements to support issuing the injunction and that the balance of equities favored plaintiffs here,” Mack Rosenberg added.

Doughty also found the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim, writing:

“As in Missouri v. Biden, the White House Defendants and the Surgeon General Defendants both coerced and significantly encouraged social-media platforms to suppress protected free speech.

“This Court further finds the CDC Defendants, the CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] Defendants and the FBI Defendants significantly encouraged social-media platforms to suppress protected free speech.”

Defendants ‘likely’ to use their power to suppress alternative views in the future

The defendants have argued that the actions at stake occurred in the past and cannot be remedied by issuing an injunction prohibiting future actions and that there is no “imminent harm” to the defendants because the COVID-19 pandemic and the election where the alleged conduct occurred are in the past.

However, Doughty ruled that the alleged past actions also indicate there is a substantial risk of likely future harm.

“Defendants apparently continue to have meetings with social-media companies and other contacts,” he wrote, adding:

“Although the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer an emergency, it is likely that in the event of any other real or perceived emergency event, the Defendants likely would once again use their power over social-media companies to suppress alternative views.

“And it is certainly likely that Defendants could use their power over millions of people to suppress alternative views or moderate content they do not agree with in the upcoming 2024 national election.”

Although Doughty granted a substantial part of Kennedy et al.’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the White House, the surgeon general, the CDC, FBI and the CISA, he also denied the request for an injunction against several other agencies.

The injunction excluded the U.S. Department of State, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, who were also included in the plaintiffs’ request.

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy who is on leave from CHD and is running for president of the U.S. as an independent candidate.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New Australian law, if passed, will make the gov’t the sole arbiter of truth’

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From LifeSiteNews

By David James

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it a democracy.

In a crushing blow to free speech in Australia, the lower house of federal parliament has passed an amendment, known as the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. It imposes obligations on digital communications platform providers to prevent the dissemination of content “that contains information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive, and is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm of a specified type (misinformation and disinformation).”

Several dissenting politicians have expressed outrage and incredulity at the legislative move. Nola Marino, a member of the right-wing opposition Liberal Party said that she did not think that Australia, a liberal democratic society, would ever be “debating a bill that is explicitly designed to censor and silence the Australian people.”

National Party member Keith Pitt described the legislation as a “yawning chasm that is incredibly … dangerous to this country.” He expressed shock that the amendment was being put forward, adding that Western democracies such as Australia have been built on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Such principled objections were ignored, however. The legislation now has only to pass in the Senate (the upper house) to become law.

The first and most obvious criticism of the law is that it puts the government authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in the ridiculous position of deciding what is and isn’t “false” information. That is not only absurd – how could ACMA, for example make judgements on subjects like vaccines or viruses – it means that the law cannot be applied universally.

Governments routinely put out false information, arguably more often than they put out true information. Will they be penalized? Of course not. Advertisers present information that is false. Will they fall under his law? No. It will only be directed at people who are saying things that the government does not like, especially in relation to health policy. It is politics, not law.

When governments distort the law for political ends, it inevitably ends up in badly crafted legislation, and that is what has happened here. The law depends for its integrity on clear semantics, words whose definition is clear. But two key words, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading at best.

They are variants of the word “information”; the prefixes “dis” and “mis” have been added to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth (“information” being something objectively observable). It is a diversion. What is happening instead is that the law will target the intent of the writers.

Disinformation is defined as information that is “intended” to mislead and to cause harm. With misinformation there is no such intent; it is just an error, but even there it requires determining what is in the author’s mind. The aim is to outlaw thinking that is not congruent with the governments’ official position.

Pointing out this definitional slipperiness could be the basis for an effective rebuttal of the legislation. Courts are very poor at establishing intent.

A second problem: How do we know what meaning the recipients will get? Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from approbation to intense hostility. To state the obvious, readers think for themselves and inevitably derive different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronizing and infantilizing, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans.  It is legislation that is not just aimed at controlling the thoughts of the producers of the content, it is targeted at the thoughts of the recipients: two layers of absurdity. The result would be like targeting the “thought crimes” depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Censorship regimes operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of the available content is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. But what matters is the quality of the content, not the quantity of the messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative eventually become meaningless, while sound analyses will cut through.

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. The aim is to ensure that in future health authorities and the political class are immune from scrutiny and criticism. It is unlikely to be effective. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it genuinely a democracy.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

US Lawmakers Investigate Biden White House-Affiliated UK Censorship Group’s Plot To “Kill” Elon Musk’s X

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From Reclaim The Net

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Among the investigations currently carried out by the US House Committee on the Judiciary and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is the one into a case involving UK-based “censorship group” – the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

In a letter dated November 7, Committee chairman Jim Jordan is asking CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed to, by November 21, comply with a subpoena issued on August 30, 2023.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

According to Jordan, it covers the group’s activities as well, including documents showing the Biden-Harris administration’s alleged collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans’ lawful online speech.

Another point the letter makes is the plan to “kill Musk’s Twitter” – which communications recently revealed suggest was being hatched by CCDH. And Jordan reminds Ahmed that this, too, is with the subpoena’s scope.

On August 3, 2023, the Committee asked CCDH to present it with communications it had had with the US government as well as third parties regarding “moderation of online content” – and what role the government played in this (by exerting pressure on social platforms).

The letter then cites internal CCDH documents that recently came to light – particularly emails that show “killing Musk’s Twitter” was made a priority for the group this year.

Prior to that, the letter notes, CCDH in 2020 communicated with Twitter – then under its previous ownership – to identify content and accounts that should be censored, while earlier this year, CCDH “held a private event tat included (US) Executive Branch personnel.”

Last month, UK media reported about CCDH’s effort against X, as well as a formal request from then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign suggesting the ruling Labour party was essentially interfering in US elections. Not only were Labour advisers dispatched to the US to help Kamala Harris’ effort to remain in the White House – it was also revealed that CCDH has ties to UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s party.

Namely, Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi’s Disinformation Chronicle named Stramer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney as the (co) founder of CCDH. And it just so happened that “strengthening ties with senior Democrats” features as one of the controversial group’s priorities, right along with, “killing Musk’s Twitter.”

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