Censorship And The Digital Public Square

Censorship And The Digital Public Square

Adeline Von Drehle

“We don’t want no censorship, we don’t need no censorship!” Kevin Nathaniel’s voice boomed from the podium in front of the Supreme Court as he, frontman of the Spirit Drummers, led the crowd in a series of sing-songy, reggae-inspired chants. His audience was small but excitable. Some wore Kennedy ’24 beanies and “Ivermectin saves lives” T-shirts. Others showed off signs reading “Fauci is the tyrant the founding fathers warned us about,” and “Freedom of speech includes views you don’t like,” and “Media literacy = censorship,” as they bopped along to the bongo drums.

Inside, the Supreme Court was gearing up to hear the oral arguments of Murthy v. Missouri, in which Missouri and Louisiana, as well as several individuals, claim that federal officials violated the First Amendment in their efforts to combat misinformation on social media. 

The parties contend that the Biden administration effectively coerced platforms into silencing the voices of American citizens, particularly those on the right who posted about the COVID-19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The plaintiffs have called it a “sprawling Censorship Enterprise.”

People live with different facts than their neighbors. One reason for this is social media algorithms, which use engagement features such as “like” buttons to feed users more of the content they seem to be interested in. Such a system can result in one person’s feed looking completely alien to another person. That we live in parallel universes is not news, but the dilemma it poses raises crucial questions about the responsibility of social media companies to track what is on their platforms and whether the government even has the right – or the responsibility – to counter what it deems misinformation, and when a line has been crossed into unconstitutional censorship.

Plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri claim the line was crossed, and then crossed a few hundred more times. The suit names federal officials including President Joe Biden, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and others – as well as federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the lawsuit ostensibly sets out to detail the many ways the federal government violated Americans’ First Amendment rights, it also spent a great deal of its time explaining why the information the mainstream has labeled “misinformation” is actually the truth.

The Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general cite studies, journal articles, and news stories to bolster their assertions about mail-in voter fraud and about the inefficacy of masking, quarantining, and CV-19 vaccines. “Yesterday’s ‘misinformation’ often becomes today’s viable theory and tomorrow’s established fact,” they wrote in their legal brief.

The plaintiffs go on to the meat of their complaint, which is about 50 pages of what they hope will be viewed as convincing evidence of a well-oiled censorship machine.

In one example, they present transcripts of Jen Psaki linking encouragement for social media companies to “stop amplifying untrustworthy content … especially related to CV-19, vaccinations, and elections” with comments about anti-trust regulation and privacy protections, insinuating that the federal government would impose undesirable regulations on social media companies if they do not increase censorship of right-wing messaging.

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