Both conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member court appeared reluctant to uphold a lower court ruling that would severely limit the government’s interactions with social media companies.
The case arises after a lawsuit filed by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, in which they estimate that government officials went too far in their efforts to combat misinformation about vaccines and elections. And on the other hand, they also sold false content, without solid foundations and only for partisan opinions or interests.
Last year, a lower federal court restricted the ability of some officials and agencies in Democrat Joe Biden’s administration to interact with social media companies to moderate their content.
Ruling in favor of Republican prosecutors
The ruling, which the Supreme Court suspended until hearing the case, It was a victory for the conservatives who allege that the government pressured or colluded with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor right-wing content under the pretext of fighting “misinformation”.
Representing the Justice Department before the Supreme Court on Monday, Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher said there is a “fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion.”
But it seems that Fletcher was not present in the face of all the actions of social media companies regarding the unprecedented censorship of the freedom of expression of the US president and his followers, in the best way of dictatorships in the world. He also didn’t seem to see what happened to the imposition of mandatory mass vaccination of the Biden government.
Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, said the record showed that government officials had engaged in “constantly annoying Facebook and some of the other platforms” by treating them “like their subordinates.”
But Chief Justice John Roberts, also a conservative, said the federal government does not speak with one voice. “Government is not monolithic,” Roberts noted. “That has to significantly dilute the concept of coercion, right?”
Fletcher said interactions between health officials and the platforms had to be seen in light of “an effort to get Americans vaccinated during the pandemic.”
However, Joe Biden’s government agreed with technology platforms and companies to censor scientists and Nobel Prize winners in medicine who opposed mass vaccination without sufficient evidence of the true effectiveness of the treatment.
Since the beginning They lied to all the people by telling them that the vaccine immunized them of contracting the virus called COVID-19 so that millions of individuals could get vaccinated, something that turned out to be completely false. And in this way they sold the idea of people getting vaccinated without being immunized or alerted to the severe damage it has caused to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Vaccines created in some people mini blood clots, myocarditis, hypertension and other problems recorded by researchers and scientists, in addition to thousands of medical records of people who these conditions caused death.
Little by little and with extremely controlled information, the causes of deaths caused by vaccines have come to light.
Censorship during pandemic and elections
“There was a concern that Americans were getting their vaccine news from these platforms and the platforms were promoting bad information,” Fletcher said, adding that “the platforms moderated the content long before the government spoke to them.”
J. Benjamin Aguinaga, Attorney General of Louisiana, denounced what he called “government censorship”. “It has no place in our democracy”he claimed.
The lower court’s order applied to the White House and a number of agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department and the Department of Justice, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The decision prevented agencies and officials from meeting with social media companies or reporting protected content by the First Amendment of the Constitution on freedom of expression.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry accused officials of trying to “dictate what Americans can and cannot say on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms about COVID-19, the elections, criticism of the government and more.
Millions of Americans were censored on social media platforms for referring only to what experts said about the risks of vaccines that the government and pharmaceutical companies never told the population.
Furthermore, before the 2020 elections, thousands of people were also censored for their comments supporting President Donald J. Trump and because they promoted freedoms of expression and other freedoms protected by the Constitution. And after the events at the Capitol, that level of censorship went to the extreme, and included even the president of the country himself and hundreds of thousands of his sympathizers and close collaborators.
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Source: With information from AFP and other sources
