There is an interesting development out of a case in Louisiana where a federal judge has ruled that Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House officials must testify in a case alleging a backchannel for censorship on social media. The complaint in Schmitt v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-1213 in the District Court for the Western District of Louisiana alleges that Facebook and Twitter coordinated their censorship programs with government officials. I have previously written about what some of us view as a “censorship by surrogate” system used on social media. This discovery could help understand some of those back channel contacts.
Judge Terry Doughty granted a request to require Fauci, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and others to sit under oath for up to seven hours each.
The First Amendment Rationale and Censorship Realities
As discussed earlier, social media companies have created the largest censorship system in history. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.
The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.
We have recently seen evidence supporting the suspicions of a censorship by surrogate.
Evidence of Censorship by Surrogate
The recently disclosed exchange between defendant Carol Crawford, the CDC’s Chief of digital media, revealed a back channel with Twitter and other companies to censor “unapproved opinions” on social media. The “tricky” part may be due to the fact that, during that week of March 25, 2021, then CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying on such censorship before Congress and insisting that “we don’t have a censoring department.” It seems that any meeting on systemic censorship with the government would have to wait until after Dorsey denied that such systemic censorship existed.
The exchange is part of the evidence put forward by leading doctors who are alleging a systemic private-government effort to censor dissenting scientific or medical views. The lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana was joined by experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University).
Bhattacharya objected this week to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents.Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.
The Great Barrington Declaration was not the only viewpoint deemed dangerous. Those who alleged that the virus may have begun in a lab in China were widely denounced and the views barred from being uttered on social media platforms. It was later learned that a number of leading experts raised this theory with Fauci and others early in the pandemic.
Fauci is accused of quickly scuttling such discussion, and critics point to his own alleged approval of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci and other leading experts now admit that the lab theory is a real possibility, even if they do not agree that it is the best explanation. Social media companies like Facebook declared that the previously banned “conspiracy theory” would now be allowed to be discussed. Yet, some in the media continued to push the media to avoid discussing it. The New York Times science writer Apoorva Mandavilli declared the theory “racist” even as Fauci and others were saying that it is now considered a possible explanation.
Indeed, many of the views that the media attacked as conspiracy theories or debunked are now again being seriously considered. That includes claims of adverse responses to the vaccines, natural immunity protection, and the psychological costs from masking or isolation, particularly among children. None of these views are inviolate or beyond question — any more than the official accounts were at the time. Rather, they were systemically “disappeared” from social media – pushed to the far extremes of public and academic discourse.
While the CDC now admits that it made serious mistakes during the pandemic, it allegedly worked with companies to ban opposing views. Those who sought to raise these questions found their accounts suspended. There is every reason for the CDC to combat what it considers false information through its own postings and outreach programs. However, the involvement in censoring dissenting views is deeply troubling.
The “Tricky Part” and My Earlier Testimony
That brings us back to the “tricky” part. The request for the meeting was made on March 18, 2021. That week, Dorsey and other CEOs were to appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media and their “content modification” policies. I had just testified on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “little brother problem, a problem which private entities do for the government which it cannot legally do for itself.” Dorsey insisted that there was no such censorship office or effort.
The new lawsuit sheds new light on that testimony. It now appears that the CDC was actively feeding disapproved viewpoints to these companies, including a list of tweets that the CDC regarded as misinformation. In one email, Twitter senior manager for public policy Todd O’Boyle asked Crawford to help identify tweets to be censored and emphasized that the company was “looking forward to setting up regular chats.”
Facebook also received lists of “offensive” posts to be “dealt with.” Facebook trained government officials in using its “CrowdTangle” system used by “health departments [to] flag potential vaccine misinformation” to allow the company to review and possibly remove it. It added that “this is similar to how governments and fact-checkers use CrowdTangle ahead of elections….”
That was another eye-raising reference since these companies were criticized for killing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. The story was blocked as presumed “Russian disinformation,” a move that Dorsey admitted in the March hearing was a mistake. Now, a year later, the story is accepted not just as legitimate but potentially a serious threat for the Biden Administration.
Whatever the outcome of the litigation, the filing raises, again, whether our concept of state censorship and a state media are outmoded. The last few years have seen a striking uniformity in the barring of certain political and policy viewpoints, including dissenting medical or scientific views that could potentially protect lives. That occurred without any central ministry of information or coercive state laws. It was done by mutual agreement and shared values between the government and these companies.
Discovering the Truth on Corporate Censorship Systems
What was not known were the moving parts in what has been arguably the most successful censorship system in our history. To some extent, no direction was needed beyond the periodic announcements of figures like Fauci or the CDC, which were treated as gospel and not to be challenged. Even when Fauci was criticized for reversing himself on key issues like the wearing of masks or their efficacy, it did not change the concerted effort to suppress opposing views.
The “tricky” part for the public is how to deal with the circumvention of the First Amendment in a system of censorship by surrogates.
This and other cases could well help in understanding the scope of this problem and the possible options in protecting free speech on social media.
But you see, they MUST censor in the name of disinformation. It is about protecting THEIR disinformation from DISSENT which they label as misinformation that must be censored for our own protection. Get it?
“Social Media Censorship” is a fascinating topic, with Frances Haugen (facebook) and Peiter “Mudge” Zatko (twitter) as whisteblower.
Unlike previous whistleblowers like Ryan Hartwig, Cassandra Spencer, and Zach McElroy, who exposed facebook’s censorship apparatus, Haugen, who leaked documents suggesting that facebook put profits before safety and lauched “Beyond the Screen” as non profit recently, asks for more censorship. [1]
Regarding pending $44 billion twitter purchase: Only Elon Musk knows the full intent of his objective to utilize this tech gigant and his larger aspirations to open information systems to all of us.
As Musk’ s network of business operations (SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, etc.) is heavily dependent on a partnership with the U.S. government (Department oft States,, Pentagon, NASA, FAA, etc.) and U.S. intelligence apparatus is actively involved in the background operations, Biden administration could easily stop twitter takeover [2]
[1] https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/09/27/frances-haugen-cashes-in-pro-censorship-facebook-whistleblower-launches-nonprofit/
[2] https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/10/21/twitter-stuff-reports-of-anticipated-turnover-of-employees-combined-with-reports-of-treasury-dept-considering-cfius-review/
You have to wonder when the courts will start treating the nexus between social media outlets’ censorship and politicians\gov’t officials encouraging these practices as a form of agency that is scrutinized heavily by the courts as it is in the realm of criminal justice search and seizure. What I mean is that there is considerable case law on both federal and state levels that where a private person acting on behalf of law enforcement is considered an agent of government and the courts apply the same search and seizure restraints as they would to a law enforcement officer directly.
An example of this is where police suspect, but do not have probable cause to believe, that contraband is contained within a citizen’s residence. They then ask the housekeeper employed by the citizen to video record the interior of the house. The contraband is revealed and the citizen arrested. The courts will supress this evidence and all other resultant fruits of the poison tree because the housekeeper became an agent of government when they were asked to video the house, and such searches would be unlawful if made by a LEO without a search warrant.
LEOs must be careful to avoid an agency between a third party and government if they want to avoid losing cases on evidence admissibility grounds.
I propose that under the criminal justice example speech censorship if made by 3rd parties acting under the direction of politicians/government agencies establishes a sufficiently strong nexus to prove agency with government. As such the free speech protections should be enforced as they would in the case of government officials abusing free speech directly.
Darren,
I wonder why others are not making this fairly obvious connection.
The evidence available suggests that private entities were working as government actors and this is illegal censorship. Professor Turley suggests, if I am reading correctly, that there is a fly in the ointment in that this censorship did not occur via a government ministry of truth but through a joint cooperative effort, thus making the censorship accusation more difficult. My opinion is that both the government and the private entities kept their collaboration a secret knowing full well that they were doing the wrong thing. Let the examination before trial begin…
No disrespect intended, but that was apparent when Obama invited them into the White House way back in 2013 or so. Nobody cared. That was also tge time the DOJ started cracking down on local law enforcement. Again, nobody cared. So here we are. This has all been running rampant for nigh on 15 years. Saddens me we have to go this far for people to even notice, let alone care.
“For years, Fauci, Grady [his ‘bioethicist’ wife], and much of allopathic medicine have acted in a manner outside that proscribed by SCOTUS rulings [re voluntary informed consent]. We are now in a very bad way as a direct result of Fauci and Grady degrading the standards of ethics for clinical research and medical practice in the US – and they are dragging much of the rest of the West with them.” ~James Lyons-Weiler substack
“Degrading” is too soft a word for the damage Fauci has done over his 50 years at the helm of NIAID. Yet he is only a rotten figurehead and getting rid of Fauci does little to solve the systemic problems. The whole of the NIH, FDA, CDC is rotten from the top down, and captured by the pharmaceutical industry, the very industry Fauci and his NIH colleagues are supposed to “regulate” and protect the public from.
Then we have the “news media” that is also captured by big pharma which pays 80% of its advertising revenues. Watch the evening news and count how many pharma ads appear in less than one hour. Then we have the capture and corruption of the medical journals, medical schools, medical research…..and on it goes. The corruption runs throughout the entire “system.”
It is up to the public to seek out reliable information and inform themselves. We can no longer rely on so-called “authorities” to tell us anything but lies. And that is the truth.
I see the problem being blackmail. EACH AND EVERYONE in the governing business has access to enough dirt on the rest as to keep everyone’s mouths closed tight for fear of payback. One big J. Edgar blackmail business writ large by an expanded spying government with easy access to social media of a partisan nature. In the end, NOTHING will come of anything unless there is a purge of the entire government system, including, especially, the bureaucracy.
In a previous era, huge honorariums and speaking fees for physicians would have gotten them tarred and feathered by Democrats, all the while excoriating Republicans for protecting physicians and industries in bankrupting Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
If it were not for double standards, Biden’s presidency would have no standards.
Biden’s top doctor nominee made more than $2 million doing pandemic consulting, speeches
As Vivek H. Murthy advised Joe Biden on the pandemic during the 2020 presidential campaign, culminating in Murthy’s nomination as surgeon general, he also maintained a lucrative side business: coronavirus consultant to the private sector…..
Murthy was also paid at least $522,650 to deliver about three dozen speeches to a range of audiences, which included hospitals and health insurers, as well as firms like Google and UBS Financial Services, on a variety of topics, including a book that Murthy wrote on loneliness. Murthy most recently delivered a speech on Jan. 14 to Duke University’s ethics institute about the value of working in the public sector. Murthy disclosed that he was paid $30,000 for the hour-long remarks, which was part of Duke’s “Virtues & Vocations” series.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/20/vivek-murthy-surgeon-general-coronavirus-consulting/
If people like Murthy ever face any blowback, it will be because they didn’t charge enough.
What is the going rate? Here are some comparables.
Consider the example of Barack “Michelle, you know I didn’t really mean it when I said Kamala was a looker” Obama, with his crazy book deals and multiple oceanfront estates. Or the Biden family’s take from Hunter “I might not know anything about the energy business but my dad is vice president in charge of Ukrainian policy and I need money for hookers and blow” Biden’s payments from Ukrainian gas company Burisma. And then there are Bill “I never had sex with that woman” Clinton’s speaking fees during the Uranium One scandal where Hillary “Vladimir was very sexist to me during our meetings” Clinton and the Dems sold American uranium rights to Putin’s Russia.
Murthy’s defenders will claim that he wasn’t president or the immediate family member of a president, so he shouldn’t be punished too severely for undercharging. That is patently wrong. Politicians are to be paid for their access, based on their proximity to power, and the value they are able to deliver to their corporate patrons. Failure to properly price their services is even more dangerous now that the value of the payments is being eroded by raging inflation.
Reckless actions like these will destroy the goose that laid the golden egg. They must be stopped before the value of progressive government service is destroyed.
Providing the wrong information doesn’t come cheap in the Biden Administration.
“This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.” ~ Turley
Great blog post that can be whittled down to that sentence. And of course feel free to substitute executive orders for corporations.
What really steams the public? Political back door shenanigans.
What really steams the public? Political back door shenanigans.
When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, their hope is that the new drug will be a blockbuster. When a new drug nets a revenue of over $1 Billion, in one year, that is termed a blockbuster drug for pharma. Statins (e.g. Lipitor, Crestor) have been blockbuster drugs
Warner-Lambert brought Lipitor (atorvastatin) to market in the 1990s. Lipitor was so effective at lowering cholesterol compared to its competition (e.g. Zocor/Merck and Pravachol/Bristol Myers Squibb), that Prizer wanted it from Warner Lambert. WL was not interested in selling it. So Pfizer made a hostile takeover of WL just to acquire Lipitor. They then fired WL employees. At its most lucrative year, Lipitor drew almost $15 Billion just in one year. That was considered unthinkable at the time. No other drug had come anywhere close to such a record
Pfizer’s revenue on the COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, in 2021: > $36 Billion
Pfizer’s 2021 Q4 Earnings Report is out. For 2021 they earned $81.3 billion in gross revenue, which was a 95% increase from 2020 earnings of $41.7 billion. And what fueled this incredible jump in revenue? Well, Comirnaty – its COVID-19 vaccine, which secured $36.8 billion dollars for the pharmaceutical behemoth in 2021
https://bookthepit.com/pfizer-2021-earnings/
Here is Pfizer’s 2021 year end report on sales. Reach for some Zofran before reading it
https://s28.q4cdn.com/781576035/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/Q4-2021-PFE-Earnings-Release.pdf
Thanks Darren for releasing this post. Not sure why WordPress captured it
The media has never had a Road to Damascus moment. They would not understand the reference and they could never find the road, much less understand the moment when it occurred (they would think it did not apply to them even though they were the only travelers on the road). The media requires a 2×4 moment as applied to the head.
After the concussion protocol finishes they might see the light ☀️.
Some of those hushed are internationally recognized researchers, scientists and medical providers. It is in the best interest of science that the data, how it is collected, organized and analyzed, is constantly scrutinized, challenged and those proclaiming what is fact must be required to defend themselves on an ongoing basis.
When information is being withheld, that is when one must be most suspicious. Same old trick used by abusers, cult leaders and totalitarian regimes. Withhold information. What cannot be withheld, use propaganda to warp and confuse the person who seeks the truth.
It will be nice to see them be put under oath and on the official record. One could hope that a reporter might commit an act of journalism or a court decide the case strictly on its merit. One could hope.
“There can be truth in partial truth. Partial truth that is given as whole truth is untruth.”
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential, command.”
-George Orwell, 1984
Ignore that Democrats objected to the certification of election results and demanded an audit and investigation in every election they lost.
Ignore that Democrats rioted, looted, committed arson, threw bombs at federal buildings, burned a police precinct, and seized entire city blocks at gunpoint.
Ignore that Facebook censors conservatives, or any story injurious to Democrats.
Ignore that Facebook is the propaganda mouthpiece for the Democrat-controlled government, and only when Democrats are in control.
Ignore that the public education system has become politicized far Left, and demands to politicize your children far Left.
Ignore that the vaccine no longer protects against Covid infection or its spread, and that it carries a risk of myocarditis, as it is mandated, and people are discharged from the military, fired, prevented from visiting loved ones in the hospital, or prevented from going to school.
Ignore all the Democrats who refused Congressional subpoenas or who lied outright, yet were not jailed.
Ignore all the times conservatives were banned from media platforms for spreading “misinformation” that turned out to be true – the Wuhan Institute of Virology source of Covid, Hunter’s laptop, the Russia hoax…
Look to the Party for what you are supposed to believe, think, or say. Do not think for yourself.
Okay… now what happens?
Crickets.
Social media is used by most Americans to communicate.
Social media also acts as Pravda for the Democrat Party. When that party controls the White House or the Senate, social media partners as Little Brother, censoring stories injurious to the Party, and promoting false propaganda injurious to opponents.
Facebook and Twitter have confessed that they are one of the media arms of the Democratic Party. Their CEOs have said that they shouldn’t have done what they did. They new all along that what they were doing was wrong but they did it anyway. Now that the possibility of control of the government by Republicans is eminent they just say “Oh my bad”. The future will tell if their repentance is heart felt. What are the odds that if the Democrats remain in control the back door strategy meetings will continue. They somehow think that what they have done is good for the nation. One can only hope that their road to Damascus moment is for real. Keep an eye out.
I agree that the main problem is the idea of censorship by surrogate, and the idea that government can achieve their aims of controlling speech by allowing for the farming out of the dirty work.
I also seem to recall a moment when Jen Psaki stated from the White House Press Room that “the administration was in contact with” entities like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to demand that they remove “dangerous content” about vaccines from their respective platforms.
One part of the problem is the claim that these are private companies, and they aren’t obligated to follow the United States Constitution regarding free speech principles. I question whether those arguing that principle would also say that these companies are exempt from the 16th Amendment, which authorized the Income Tax. Would they say that these businesses are exempt from having to withhold taxes from their employees’ paychecks?
Seven hours is not long enough. This complaint, which I encourage all to read, alleges in great detail the myriad ways in which the Federal government censored views it disliked by working through the social media companies. The remedy is to enjoin any government official from encouraging or assisting in censorship, regardless of whether the speech being challenged is labelled misinformation, disinformation or any other euphemism that may be invented. A further remedy is to follow the Texas law and prohibit viewpoint censorship by privately owned large social media platforms by declaring them to be common carriers. This should be part of the Republican mission when it soon controls the House and possibly the Senate.
In a just world Fauci could be facing a criminal trial.
I am not one of the jail Fauci crowd. I am more interested in establishing. Truthful records and detailing what happened so that we don’t repeat these abuses and missteps.
It’s beyond clear they are out to kill/harm us all.
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Science & Tech
LETHAL INJECTIONS: 18% of Cattle DIE Immediately Following mRNA ‘Vaccination’
by Ethan Huff | Natural News
October 22nd 2022, 1:45 pm
Dairy farmers reportedly now being forced to inject their animals with the experimental Covid show in order to remain in business.
Is it safe to consume mRNA-tainted milk and cheese from a “fully vaccinated” dairy cow?
https://www.infowars.com/posts/lethal-injections-18-of-cattle-die-immediately-following-mrna-vaccination/
It’s slow at the start, but the guts are very interesting, I think.
the hidden Internet.
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https://banned.video/watch?id=6353303d2b3690202b95d967
This could be the tip of the iceberg. Let the Dem throw-your-colleagues-under-the-bus-to-evade-suspicion-fest, and gaslighting at a level that could render the sun inert, begin! There is just too much over the past seven years for any hope of Progressives successfully backtracking. I don’t have the bloodlust Dems do, due to my not being emotionally five years old; marginalization would be just fine.
If hubris we’re a felony.
Colluding for fun (ideology) profit, is.
Buck up guys, the truth shall set you free.
The first to confess gets a pass.
We are going to see weasels weaseling.
Pathetic, but the truth won’t come so easily.