“fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally
Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the first two weeks of research. Our central thesis about state-sponsored censorship was online months before we met Benz. By mid-December 2022, I knew we were looking at a sweeping federal content-control program, and repeated the idea many times. As I wrote on Christmas Eve, 2022:
The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government —from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA… The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)… Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.
Nonetheless, the gist of today’s Times piece is that Shellenberger and I got this thesis from Benz. They literally wrote it that way, that when I testified to Congress, I was presenting his thesis.
Related: David Rennie:
First time I’ve seen this: Chinese state TV pushing out an AI-generated animation showing workers across America striking and rioting as a result of income inequality and democratic crisis.
LAW DORK: The worse the government’s behavior was, the more likely it is that the platform is now liable.
ABDO: That’s right. It’s strange. The theory under Blum, basically, is the government has a gun to your head, and you’re doing the government’s bidding, and now potentially, you could be subject to damages liability for responding in the way that anyone would respond if you’re actually being coerced to that extent. But the other complication is that whatever remedy the plaintiff gets in that kind of the case might interfere with the First Amendment rights of the platforms and their users. You can imagine in the Murthy case, if the plaintiffs met the higher state action test, they might be entitled to an injunction directing, say Facebook or Twitter, to reinstate their accounts, or reinstate their posts, or even change their content moderation policies. And that has implications for the First Amendment.
NCLA:
This censorship regime has successfully suppressed perspectives contradicting government-approved views on hotly disputed topics such as whether natural immunity to Covid-19 exists, the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate efficacy. The vast, coordinated silencing of First Amendment-protected speech has targeted influential, highly qualified voices including doctors and scientists like Drs. Bhattacharya, Kheriaty, and Kulldorff, as well as those like Ms. Hines who have tried to raise awareness of issues.
NCLA has emphasized throughout this case that the First Amendment’s text forbids “abridging” (diminishing) the freedom of speech, meaning the government’s scheme violates the Constitution even when it encourages social media platforms to suppress legal speech without coercing them. Though the Fifth Circuit’s injunction only forbids coercing or significantly encouraging the suppression of legal speech, the Supreme Court could and should expand it to bar the government from getting the social media platforms to abridge speech to any degree whatsoever.
