Unchecked by Courts, Government Censorship of Social Media Platforms Will Prove Fatal to Free Speech in Digital Age

The Biden administration’s increasingly aggressive efforts to combat so-called misinformation, along with the prospective acquisition of Twitter by free speech advocate Elon Musk, have sparked a national debate about what role, if any, the government should play in censoring social media.

While some have applauded the administration’s campaign to police online “misinformation” about COVID-19 and other subjects, including through its recent creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Department of Homeland Security, others have harshly criticized the notion that the government should be the arbiter of truth.

As these critics have observed, many views derided as COVID-19 “misinformation” in 2020 or 2021—for instance, that the virus originated in a lab and that community masking appears to be relatively ineffective—are now gaining traction in mainstream circles.

Likewise, government officials, including President Joe Biden and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, have made claims that later turned out to be untrue, such as that the vaccines reliably stop transmission and that masks are 80% effective at preventing infection.

These revelations have prompted many discerning Americans to question the notion that anyone—whether the government or tech companies—should be allowed to control information shared on social media. Indeed, the understanding that no one has a monopoly on the truth, and that governments are themselves prone to bias and disseminating falsehoods, is a primary reason the Framers included the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Yet in the same week, four separate lawsuits brought on behalf of suspended Twitter users challenging such censorship on First Amendment grounds were dismissed in federal courts, including one brought by former President Donald Trump.

Three of the four lawsuits—all except Trump’s—were premised on versions of the theory that social media censorship is effectively state action, due to pressure exerted on companies by the federal government to quell the spread of “misinformation.”

Plaintiffs pointed to myriad statements by Biden administration officials and congressional Democrats, beginning as early as December 2020, threatening to hold social media platforms “accountable” or “liable” if they do not censor users who spread virus “misinformation.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/01/unchecked-by-courts-government-censorship-of-social-media-platforms-will-prove-fatal-to-free-speech-in-digital-age

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