Category Archives: censorship

The Supreme Court stopped a temporary injunction to block the Biden administration’s ongoing conversations about disinformation with social media companies on Oct. 20, 2023.

This leaves federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control free to attempt to influence  social media companies in order to  (as the administration says) “mitigate the hazards of online misinformation” by flagging content that violated the social media platforms’ own policies.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana have contended in Murthy v Missouri (aka Missouri v Biden) that the government “coerced, threatened, and pressured social-media platforms to censor” them, in violation of the First Amendment.  US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is named as a defendant in the suit.  Evidence of this pressure campaign  emerged when the Twitter Files were released after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took over company management on Oct. 27, 2022.  CNN published an article about the Twitter Files Dec. 2, 2022.

See SCOTUS Blog, Justices Allow Continued Communication …
Also: FIRE Statement on Murthy v Missouri being granted cert

George Orwell, journalist and author of “1984”

“Big Tech is not the Ministry of Truth.”
Or at least, so says the Attorney  General of Alabama  who has invited citizens to file formal complaints if they have been censored on social media.

“It should concern us all when platforms that hold such tremendous power and influence over information wield that power in contradiction of—and with undisguised disdain for—the foundational American principles of free speech and freedom of the press,” says Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. “The censorship campaign currently being waged by giant corporate oligarchs like Facebook and Twitter is, in a word, un-American.”

You may recall that in Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth controls news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Of course, truth is only what the ministry says it is.   Speaking up for some idea that is not “true”  is punishable by death or indefinite  imprisonment.

But it’s just a novel.  It may go without saying, but here in the US at least, nobody’s life is on the line and nobody is headed for Siberia for some crackpot  Q-nut idea they want to shout to the world.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have blocked or even banned a few US citizens who insist on deadly lies, for example, that the last election was fraudulent;  that vaccines don’t work; that the virus  is a hoax; that masks are the “mark of the beast;” and so on.  Facebook and Twitter are trying to apply a standard of human dignity and provable truth through their terms of service.

Don’t like it?  Fine. Go to the competition.  There are dozens of new social media platforms, according to a July 2021 article in Forbes.  You don’t even have to pay for a subscription. Jeez.

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