‘Step in Right Direction’: Free Speech Activist Hails Order Blocking Biden-Social Media Coordination
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On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies about much of the content on their networks. For years, they have worked to suppress what the government called misinformation about COVID-19, election interference, and other topics Washington desired to keep out of the public discourse.
While the judge gave some allowances for continued communication about threats of violence and to national security, the rest was blocked via preliminary injunction due to the judge’s belief that a lawsuit challenging the behavior on free speech grounds was likely to succeed.
Misty Winston, political activist, organizer and co-host of Facts on the Ground, told Sputnik on Friday that many critics have accused Judge Terry A. Doughty of making a partisan ruling in favor of Republicans, having been appointed by then-US President Donald Trump.
“That may very well be the case, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a good thing,” she told Radio Sputnik.
“The government has no business contacting social media companies and requesting that they take down information. They try to use the idea that, oh, this is in the public interest because of false and misleading information about Covid. Well, a lot of the false and misleading information about Covid came from the government. And it wasn't just that they were silencing the average, everyday citizen: they were shutting down doctors and scientists and researchers who are at the top of their field. That's something that they should not be allowed to do. We have a First Amendment for a reason, and the First Amendment says that the government cannot limit your speech. And that is exactly what happens when the Biden administration contacts or any administration contacts social media companies and requests that they take down posts just simply because they want to call them misleading or misinformation, they get to define those terms.”
“It's going to be politicized, it's going to become a partisan issue. And that's really unfortunate because this isn't about Covid, it's not about left or right, this is about the government interfering with speech. And that is exactly what's happening.”
“We know it's not just simply them calling them up and being like, ‘hey, what do you think about this?’ They're calling up Twitter and they're saying, ‘here's this post. Here's this person. They don't we don't like what they're posting.’ I mean, we know that that is the case. And in fact, it goes even farther than that. We now know that the FBI was contacting social media companies to get information about a journalist, Aaron Maté, to give to the Ukrainian government. I mean, this is a huge thing, but it's not often talked about because I think mainstream media obviously is on the side of the government here. They obviously want to be able to have a lock down on the narrative. And so but we know that that's not true.”
Winston remarked that another example noted in Judge Doughty’s ruling was the suppression of a New York Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s so-called “Laptop From Hell,” which was published just weeks before the November 2020 election.
“In the Hunter Biden laptop story [there] is a massive indication of that, because that is I mean, the people who spent four or five years screaming about foreign election interference were themselves interfering in an election. That is election interference, to silence a story like that right before the election takes place. That is obviously going to have severe implications on the way people think about the election or who they may vote for. That is a really dangerous territory to be in, and to take down a news website and to take, you know, deplatform them and to remove their ability to to post a story that is based in fact, in truth, that is a really dangerous and slippery slope.”
“I'm not a big fan of [US Senator] Rand Paul (R-KY), but Rand Paul on the floor of Congress said the biggest purveyor of misinformation is the United States government. We know that to be true. They've lied to us how many times? Weapons of mass destruction, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Syrian gas attacks. I mean, it's just one after the other after the other. We know that they’ve lied to us on a regular basis. So the idea that we want to hand them over power to determine what is misinformation and give them the ability to censor anybody that disagrees with them - that's terrifying. That is not okay. And that is something we all need to be fighting against. And so this ruling is a really great step in the right direction in that in that fight.”
However, Winston’s criticism of those threatening free speech wasn’t just limited to the US government: the activist noted that recent policy changes by Twitter CEO Elon Musk have also restricted users’ access to information in a public forum. Over the weekend, Musk announced that users would be limited to seeing a certain number of posts per day, based on whether the user had a paid or unpaid account.
“He's trying to kill Twitter. Like, what else could it be? It's ridiculous. What is he thinking? I don't know if it was just a money grab. I know that Twitter has lost a lot of money. He claims that it's never about that. Right? It's never about the money,” Winston said. “He's a billionaire. That's ridiculous. But yeah, that would kill Twitter. I think people would flee the platform. Listen, I'm not paying for Twitter. Period. End of story. There's nothing about it that makes it that valuable to me that I'm willing to pay a monthly subscription to use a social media platform. I'm just not willing to do it. But limiting the amount of posts that people can see, that's so absurd, because you don't even have control over which posts that you see, it's just given to you in a random order on your feed.”
She noted that Musk gave varying explanations about the cause of the limitations, including data mining and screenshots, none of which seemed to satisfy observers.
“You know what makes me giggle a little bit is that, you know, Elon Musk, the guy who released the Twitter Files and claims he's all about transparency. There was no transparency surrounding that whole ordeal over the weekend. There was no warning. There was no explanation. And then when explanations did come, they were kind of vague. And then it was like there was an explanation. Then there was another one, and then it was you know what I mean? Like there was no transparency. There was no communication about what was going on beforehand or even during the situation. And then finally, when he did explain … it was just a whole hot mess.”
