U.S. government gets sued for working to bankrupt conservative media
Joe Biden talks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Wednesday, March 23, 2022, for his trip to Europe. (Official White House photo by Carlos Fyfe)
The federal government's "Censorship Industrial Complex" is being hit with a new lawsuit that challenges it for being "one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history."
A report at The Federalist explains it is working with the Daily Wire and the state of Texas on the legal case.
The case, in U.S. District Court, alleges the U.S. State Department has funded and backed censorship efforts "aimed at bankrupting media outlets with conservative views," according to a report at Twitchy.
The federal bureaucracy, under Joe Biden, is accused of "violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims.
The Federalist explained the lawsuit is to stop government censorship activities "even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden)."
In that case, WND has reported, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty said the feds, in fact, were playing the Orwellian role of a "Ministry of Truth," that fictional entity in "1984" that was tasked with spreading lies.
Daily Wire And The Federalist Sue Biden State Department Over Censorship Effort https://t.co/XW6RITFSD2 pic.twitter.com/aibm23aBhB
— Daily Wire News (@DailyWireNews) December 6, 2023
That case now is pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. It charges the program set up by the Biden administration worked like this: Since government cannot directly censor speech, Biden's bureaucrats would work with various sympathetic foundations or other organizations. Biden's officials would tell the foundations what they wanted tech and social media corporations to censor, and those organizations then would lobby the companies to do that.
In the case, attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration over its communications with social media companies concerning the censorship of various ideas. They charged that indirect route to censorship was equally a violation of the First Amendment.
Doughty agreed and ordered government agencies to stop, but the Biden administration, wanting to keep the censorship plan alive, appealed.
The new case accuses federal officials of unlawfully helping suppress conservative-leaning speech on major social media platforms, such as Meta's Facebook, Alphabet's YouTube and X, formerly called Twitter.
Enough is enough. https://t.co/klBzZeQzNf
— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) December 6, 2023
The new challenge to Democrats' demands to silence viewpoints with which they disagree charges the State Department "is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign 'disinformation' instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike," the report says.
Additional investigations also have confirmed the government counterterrorism resources and tactics were being used to shape American public opinion and policy.
The Federalist said, "Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department 'is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.'"
The case builds on the evidence provided by the "Twitter Files" revelations, a series of reports that found federal agencies were working to push literally all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of conservative posts.
Biden's Department of Justice even now is trying to jail an American citizen for posting election jokes on social media.
The report continued, "The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the 'vast censorship enterprise' that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence."
In fact, it charges that State's "Globel Engagement Center" actually is "the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech.”
The lawsuit accuses State and its officials of evaluating more than 365 tools "for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information."
The most effective then are given to "favored media outlets, academics and government agencies" as well as Silicon Valley tech companies.
They are purported to be "fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology."
A key strategy is that used by NewsGuard, which claims to "rate" reliability of news organizations, a system that then deprives "leftists' media competitors" of ad dollars by falsely claiming they distribute "disinformation" and are "unreliable."
The report said companies including YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon have fallen for the false statements.
The report charged, "All of the outlets on GDI’s 'least risky' list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 'least risky' outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist."
The case is in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas.
It seeks a ruling that the State Department's actions be declared illegal and to permanently bar it from developing, promoting, or encouraging others to use technology to de-amplify, shadow ban, or restrict "the lawful speech of the American press and Americans."
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