From LifeSiteNews

By Didi Rankovic

The lawsuit, led by video blogger Éloïse Boies, argues YouTube violated freedom of expression under the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms by censoring COVID-related content.

A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of COVID-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada.

The primary plaintiff in the case which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, while the filing accuses the Google video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself.

A copy of the order can be found HERE.

READ: Elon Musk skewers Trudeau gov’t Online Harms bill as ‘insane’ for targeting speech retroactively

Boies, who runs the “Élo Wants to Know” channel, states in the lawsuit that three of her videos got removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about… censorship) for allegedly violating the website’s policies around medical disinformation and contradicting World Health Organization and local health authorities’ COVID narratives of the time.

However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented unlawful and intentional suppression of free expression. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having videos deleted, the censorship also branded her an “antivaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts.

The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class-action status of the lawsuit stems from it including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos dealing with COVID got censored, or who were prevented from watching such videos, starting in mid-March 2020 and onward.

Google, on the other hand, argues that it is under no obligation to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and can therefore not be held accountable for decisions to censor content it doesn’t approve of – or as the giant phrased it, provide space for videos “regardless of their content.”

But when Superior Court Judge Lukasz Granosik announced his decision, he noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of speech, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.”

Stressing the importance that Canada’s Supreme Court assigns to guaranteed freedom of expression as a key building block in a democratic society, the judge concluded that “If (Google) carries out censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and prevents other people from viewing these same videos, it thus hinders the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.”

Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it contradicts health authorities, WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensation, and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, as well as “additional compensation provided for by law since the filing of the request for authorization to take collective action, as per the court’s decision.”

As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on damages will be the subject of a future hearing.

Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.

From the Brownstone Institute

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

In March 2021, the Biden White House initiated a brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaign to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books from Amazon.

The effort, spearheaded by White House censors including Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed Amazon demanding to speak to an executive about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”

Their subsequent discussions remain unknown, but recently released emails from the House Judiciary Committee reveal that the censors achieved their intended result. Within a week, Amazon adopted a shadow ban policy.

Company officials wrote in internal emails, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” They further clarified that the policy was “due to criticism from the Biden people,” presumably meaning Slavitt and Flaherty.

At the time, “vaccine misinformation” was parlance for inconvenient truths. Five months after the Amazon censorship crusade, Twitter banned Alex Berenson at the Government’s behest for noting that the shots do not prevent infection or transmission. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) favorably cited his Twitter ban in a September 2021 letter to Amazon  calling for increased censorship of books.

A similar process occurred at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in internal emails that the platform decided to ban claims related to the lab-leak theory in February 2021 after “tense conversations with the new Administration.” Facebook executive Nick Clegg similarly wrote that the censorship was due to “pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more.” Another internal Facebook email from August 2021 wrote that the company had implemented new “misinformation” policies “stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”

Not only does the Biden regime’s call for de facto book bans lead to the suppression of true information regarding lockdowns, vaccine injuries, and the lab-leak theory; it was also a clear violation of the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court weighed in on a nearly identical case over sixty years ago.

In 1956, the Rhode Island legislature created a “Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth.” Like “public health” or “inclusivity,” the innocuous language was a Trojan Horse for censorship.

The Commission sent notices to bookshops and book dealers that potentially violated Rhode Island’s obscenity laws. The book dealers challenged the constitutionality of the Commission, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court in Bantam Books v. Sullivan.

The New York Times’ description of the case from 1962 could be transposed to a modern article on the Amazon Files, but The Gray Lady has deemed the news unfit to print and has ignored the revelations entirely.

The challengers argued that the Commission acted “as a censor” while the Government “contended that its purpose was only to educate people,” the Times explained. The Government, desperate to maintain its benevolent facade, insisted its “hope [was] that the dealer would ‘cooperate’ by not selling the branded books and magazines.”

But the Government’s call for “cooperation” was a thinly veiled threat. The Commission did not just notify the booksellers; they also sent copies of the notices to the local police, who “always called dealers within 10 days of the notice to see whether the offending items had been withdrawn,” according to the book dealers.

“This procedure produced the desired effect of frightening off sale of the books deemed objectionable,” a book dealer told The Times. They complied, “not wanting to tangle with the law.”

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Committee’s reports violated the Constitutional rights of the book dealers. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a concurring opinion: “This is censorship in the raw; and in my view the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”

Here, we again see censorship in the raw; bureaucratic thugs, using the power of the US federal government, call for the suppression of information that they find politically inconvenient. They hide behind the innocuous language of “public health” and “public-private partnerships,” but the Leviathan’s “requests” carry an implicit threat.

As we wrote in “The Censors’ Henchmen,” the censorship demands from White House lackeys Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt are like mobsters’ interrogations. Just months after the Amazon demands, Flaherty wrote to Facebook, “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period.” Then came the demands: “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game…This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

In other words, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Nice company you have here – it would be a shame if something happened to it.

When companies refused to comply, Biden’s henchmen responded with scorn. Facebook ignored one censorship request, and Flaherty exploded: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

Failure to comply would threaten Amazon’s substantial government contracting operations. In April 2022, Amazon received a $10 billion contract from the NSA. Later that year, the US Navy granted Amazon a $724 million cloud computing contract, and the Pentagon awarded Amazon an additional $9 billion in contracts. Amazon also has ongoing contracts with the CIA that could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars.

“Cooperation” is a prerequisite for these lucrative agreements. Sixty years ago, the Court recognized the threat that Government demands for “cooperation” posed to liberty in Bantam Books. Ten years later, the Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Since then, skyrocketing government spending and public-private partnerships have further blurred the line between state and private persons at the cost of our liberties.

The recent Amazon revelations add to the censors’ parade of horribles that have been uncovered in recent years. The Supreme Court will rule on the crux of the battle between free speech and Biden’s cosa nostra next month in Murthy v. Missouri.

Meanwhile, the revelations keep pouring in, adding to what we know but still concealing the fullness of what might actually have been happening. Adding to the difficulty is that the revelations themselves are not being widely reported, raising serious questions concerning just how much in the way of independent media remains following this brutal crackdown on free speech that took place with no legislation and no public oversight.