Tipsheet

Republican Attorneys General Sue Biden for Colluding With Big Tech

Spencer Brown
Spencer Brown  |  May 09, 2022 8:00 PM

The Republican Attorneys General for Louisiana — Jeff Landry — and Missouri — Eric Schmitt — filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration last week for what is alleged to be collusion with big tech companies including Meta, Twitter, and YouTube in order to suppress free expression and advance Biden's agenda and policies. 

The suit names the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as defendants along with President Joe Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, CISA Director Jen Easterly, and Disinformation Governance Board Director Nina Jankowicz in their official capacities. 

As Schmitt and Landry explain in their complaint, "Freedom of speech is the bedrock of American liberty" and government officials lack authority to censor disfavored speakers or viewpoints." As they point out, "Merely labeling speech 'misinformation' or 'disinformation' does not strip away First Amendment protections." What's more, they rightly state that "counterspeech, not censorship, is the proper response to supposed 'misinformation.'" The lawsuit also points out that "public and private attempts to police 'misinformation' or 'disinformation' on social media have proven embarrassingly inaccurate."

In an exhaustive Twitter thread, Attorney General Schmitt brought the receipts of the Biden administration's work with big tech platforms to advance the president's agenda and talking points while suppressing dissenting voices and ideas as well as stories that would be damaging to Biden and Democrats such as Hunter Biden's "Laptop from Hell" and the lab leak origin theory for COVID-19.

As Schmitt highlights, "In Oct. 2020, after publishing an article on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, the New York Post's main Twitter account was locked, and Twitter blocked other users from sharing the link." The reporting from The Post was later vindicated and confirmed by liberal outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post, although their validation came more than one year after the 2020 election. 

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Schmitt also points to February of 2020 when "Facebook and other social media platforms began aggressively censoring speech about the Lab Leak Theory, and Facebook updated its content moderation on COVID-19 to include 'false' and 'debunked' claims that COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured." 

"Only after major media outlets confirmed that COVID-19 escaping from a lab is a feasible possibility did Facebook and others stop censoring speech related to the Lab Leak Theory," Schmitt continues before adding that The Wall Street Journal characterized the situation as "Facebook acted in lockstep with the government."

Schmitt further reminds of previous threats candidate Biden made about big tech companies and their Section 230 protections for not doing enough to censor disfavored information and voices, and then highlights examples of now-President Biden continuing "to threaten and collude with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech."

There are additional situations that back up Schmitt and Landry's case, such as a Reuters report that quoted a Facebook spokesperson who said "the company has partnered with government experts" to take "aggressive action against misinformation about COVID-19." And Jen Psaki's statement from the White House podium that called for social media companies to coordinate their censorship of users engaging in what the White House considered to be some kind of wrong-speak. "You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others," Psaki said. 

"As outlined in our lawsuit, it's clear that top officials in the Biden administration have colluded with social media companies to censor free speech, and we're working to hold them accountable," Schmitt tweeted.