All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
Recent lawsuits shine a light on actions by the Biden administration and private companies to allegedly censor Americans. The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency’s (CISA) efforts to fight COVID-19 misinformation have raised concerns about government overreach.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten says the latest lawsuit could expose Big Tech’s attempts to quiet political and pandemic-related online speech and hold the censorship regime accountable.
The “private side” of America’s mass public-private censorship regime may be about to face its day in court. Before, we told you about the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, and the integral role it’s played as the federal government’s “nerve center” in the censorship-industrial complex.
Evidence, particularly from Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden shows it played a key role in coordinating meetings between government agencies and Big Tech partners to silence political and pandemic-related wrongthink under guise of national security and public health; “switchboarded” such wrongthink to social media companies for censorship; and routed problematic content through other often government-linked research and academic organizations to do the flagging for censorship to social media platforms, to get around that pesky First Amendment.
Now maybe the biggest of the non-government partners with which government agencies, led by CISA, coordinated, the anti-disinformation consortium the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, and its successor, the Virality Project are facing suit for upholding their half of the censorship bargain. On May 2, plaintiffs Jill Hines and Jim Hoft brought suit against the often government-linked researchers, academics, and institutions behind these two consortia.
Hines is co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana. She launched an effort called Reopen Louisiana during the pandemic. Hines claims that her groups and their followers on social media have experienced and continue to experience “extensive censorship of her speech on social media, including speech related to COVID-19 restrictions and election-related speech.”
Hoft, who runs the conservative website, The Gateway Pundit, also claims such censorship. The Election Integrity Project referred to him as the “Number Two superspreader” of misinformation on Twitter. The Virality Project has also flagged his vaccine-related speech content as “misinformation.”
In their suit, Hines v. Stamos, they argue the feds, led by CISA, helped birth the EIP, “designed to fill a ‘gap’ in the government’s ability to police so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ about elections on social media” — that gap being the First Amendment, which it was designed to circumvent.
