Discovery Into Government’s COVID Censorship Campaign to Continue.
Posted by Ed Folsom, November 11, 2024.
The case against the government’s COVID-19 and 2020 election censorship campaign, in Murthy v. Missouri, lives on. When the case began last year, it was styled Missouri v. Biden. The Plaintiffs are a group of states and private individuals who complain that the Biden administration violated their First Amendment rights by pressuring social media companies to censor their speech regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election on social media platforms, including Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter (now X). The plaintiffs moved for an injunction barring the defendants from continuing their social media coercion campaign while the case moved forward.
The District Court issued a broad injunction against the defendants, accompanied by an extensive recitation of facts. The defendants appealed to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit largely agreed with the District Court’s factual findings regarding the government’s coercion campaign and violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights, but it narrowed the scope of the injunction. The defendants finally appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which point the case was restyled as Murthy v. Missouri. This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed the injunction that was left in place by the Fifth Circuit, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the District Court for proceedings consistent with its ruling.
Back at the District Court, on November 8, 2024, the Court issued a new memorandum and order allowing the Plaintiffs to proceed with further discovery related to jurisdiction. The jurisdiction question hinges on whether the Plaintiffs have standing to proceed. But wait a minute. Didn’t the U.S. Supreme Court rule that the plaintiffs lacked standing? Yes, but District Court Judge Terry Doughty reasoned that the Supreme Court only clearly ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to secure an injunction against the defendants while litigation was pending.
Plaintiffs are required to make a higher showing of standing to obtain injunctive relief than to merely continue with a lawsuit. The Supreme Court’s ruling, that the plaintiffs failed to make the higher showing of standing to justify injunctive relief, does not necessarily mean that the plaintiffs lack standing to pursue their lawsuit with no injunction in place. As the District Court put it in its Memorandum Order: “So, what is a district court to do when jurisdiction is neither certainly existent nor certainly non-existent?”
What the District Court did was to order that the plaintiffs are entitled to conduct further discovery on the issue of jurisdiction/standing. The Court is satisfied that allowing further discovery will not lead to a “jurisdictional fishing expedition,” citing the following as evidence that further discovery has the potential to demonstrate jurisdiction/standing:
Plaintiffs first cite evidence of which we can take judicial notice—certain fruits of a congressional investigation. Namely, internal Meta documents and a letter from Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. One particular example of internal Meta communications is especially supportive of standing: two Meta employees internal discussion that Meta censored the lab leak theory of Covid’s origins “because [they] were under pressure from the [Biden] administration’ to do so.”
The Court stated:
In a case where the government is uniquely in control of the facts, information, documents, and evidence regarding the extent and nature of their mass censorship efforts serious jurisdictional discovery is likely the only vehicle by which Plaintiffs could attempt to prove standing. And if all of that weren’t enough, the emails Plaintiffs attached—showing the pains that certain persons and entities went through to hide their tracks—make clear that if a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech on that topic evidence of such coordination would not be easy to find. Again, every judge that has examined the merits of this case has found a First Amendment violation. This reality, taken alongside the unique hurdles Plaintiffs face in acquiring facts supportive of particularized standing, clearly warrants further discovery [internal quotes and citations omitted].
We can hope that, with regime change looming for the U.S. Government, the relevant records will soon be controlled by those with less personal incentive than those in the current regime to cover up or destroy any records that remain in existence. We can also hope that the records don’t go, or haven’t already gone, the way of the emails that once existed on Hillary Clinton’s private servers.
Every judge that has examined the merits of the case has found that the government violated the First Amendment. How the government went about violating the constitutional rights of its citizens, and just how much it violated their constitutional rights, is a matter that should be out in the open for all to see. And then we should smash their censorship machinery to smithereens, burn it, and scatter it to the four winds.
Also, by the way, the District Court found that, “In addition to misinformation regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy.” Meanwhile, a recent report from the U.S. House of Representatives demonstrates that the U.S. Government spent $900 million on a campaign that disseminated highly scientifically inaccurate information to the public on COVID vaccines, boosters, and mask effectiveness in support of the Government’s official COVID-19 policies. In other words, the Government paid big bucks to disseminate the party line, truth be damned, while silencing contrary information regardless of its accuracy.
Good riddance, for now, to the “Shut up, smile and bow to me while I shove this down your throat” brigades. It’s too bad we can’t put them all in a time capsule and send them back to China at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or to 1937 Russia during the Great Purge and show trials, or to 1939 Berlin, or to some other appropriate time and place where they could blend into the prevailing, government-induced, greater-good zeitgeist and get it out of their system.
Related Posts:
https://edfolsomlaw.com/2024/02/update-on-thought-police-here-and-abroad/
