(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is considering whether the Biden administration urging social networks to censor so-called COVID-19 “misinformation” was enough to make Twitter’s decision to suspend three users between December 2021 and March 2022 an act of government-directed censorship rather than a private management decision.
Courthouse News Service reported that on June 15 a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit heard oral arguments on behalf of Mark Changizi, Michael Singer, and Daniel Kotzin, whose accounts were suspended after making statements at odds with what at the time was the establishment view of the COVID pandemic, including that “Covid is 10 to 20 times less dangerous than the flu for kids” and “the vast majority have realized that every Covid policy […] has been one, giant fraud.”
Represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the men contend that Twitter was not merely exercising discretion over the use of its platform but rather acting in response to calls by federal government officials to quash dissenting COVID views, and particularly threats of new federal regulations if platforms did not take action on their own.
In July 2021, LifeSiteNews reported on President Joe Biden declaring that Facebook was “killing people” by not censoring more COVID “misinformation” and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki acknowledging that the administration had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
Last September, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said they obtained documents indicating that “dozens of federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies,” including the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health & Human Services (HHS), were involved in a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” with the “intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.”
Last May, U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus Jr. dismissed the case on the grounds that Biden officials did not start publicly demanding stricter censorship until several months after the plaintiffs were suspended. “That is not the law,” the men argue in their appeal. “Plaintiffs had only to plead that the government exerted coercive power over tech companies, a standard easily met since several federal officials publicly stated that they were doing just that.”
The censored tweeters faced “only a 12-hour suspension until the government started pounding on these social media companies,” NCLA attorney John Vecchione argued before the Sixth Circuit. “Once the government started speaking, the curtain came down and darkness resulted as far as free speech is concerned.” Further, “it wasn’t just that the president talked. The surgeon general sent out inquiries about where this information is coming from.”
U.S. Supreme Court precedent such as 1973’s Norwood v. Harrison holds that “a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” UCLA law professor and prominent libertarian Eugene Volokh has written that claims about government encouraging private censorship may be theoretically sound but face uphill battles due to the challenge of producing “powerful evidence of government coercion,” as opposed to government officials merely expressing opinions about what social networks should do.
The issue has since become moot as applied specifically to Twitter, which last year was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, who set to work making the platform more open and politically neutral. But it remains a pressing issue for Big Tech as a whole, with platforms such as Facebook and Google’s YouTube still dominated by left-wing activists.