In response to the Biden administration’s continued push for censorship on social media, George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley blasted the federal government for using the same “clarion call” as all other nations that have “engaged in censorship.”
The Biden administration recently announced their decision to appeal a ruling barring them from contacting social media companies for censorship, which came from Trump-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit. This is just the White House’s latest signal of their support for censorship.
The lawsuit was filed by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, where they accused the Biden administration of pressuring social media companies to censor ideas that contradict the establishment narrative — including content related to the COVID pandemic and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In issuing the injunction, Doughty pointed out that the attorneys general had “produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
The judge also stated in his ruling that “Facebook noted that in response to White House demands, it was censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines ‘that does not contain actionable misinformation.’”
Here’s why this ruling is so important
We now know the FBI coordinated w/Twitter to suppress articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020
15%+ of Biden voters said if they knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop, they wouldn’t have voted for him
That’s *millions* of voters… https://t.co/0hknRwRhf4
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 4, 2023
During an appearance on the Friday broadcast of Fox News’ “The Story,” Turley explained his concerns about the Biden administration’s penchant for censorship.
“This is the clarion call of every nation that has engaged in censorship,” the law professor said. “They always say that they’re protecting citizens from harmful thoughts, harmful ideas, harmful viewpoints, that this is all for the good, because you shouldn’t hear these views. That’s always been the case.”
“But what’s really distressing is when you read the Twitter Files and you read the evidence that we have seen come out recently, the government was even censoring what they call malinformation,” Turley continued. “This is stuff that is true that the government says is being used for a misleading purpose. Try that hat on for a second. They’re saying that if you say something true, but the government believes it’s misleading in the way you said it, they also were targeting you for censorship.”
While free speech on Twitter is portrayed as harmful, the company has promised to “prioritize kindness.”
That sounds eerily familiar to some of us as a way to deprioritize free speech. https://t.co/P0sPgBVR2c— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 10, 2023
