Judges to decide if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can sue Biden administration for colluding with social media companies to censor free speech

From LifeSiteNews

By Suzanne Burdick Ph.D., The Defender

The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has heard oral arguments in the landmark censorship case, Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al.

The hearing focused on two points, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) general counsel, told The Defender. First, the 5th Circuit is considering whether to uphold a lower court’s August decision that two of the three plaintiffs – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD – have legal standing to bring the suit.

Second, it’s considering whether to uphold the Lousiana court’s injunction, which would prohibit the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor Kennedy and CHD’s social media posts until the lawsuit is settled.

The case – brought by Kennedy, CHD, and news consumer Connie Sampognaro – alleges that President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and other top administration officials and federal agencies “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

During the October 8 hearing, Jed Rubenfeld – Yale law professor and attorney for the plaintiffs – told judges, “District court called this the most massive attack on free speech in this nation’s history, and it would be shocking if no plaintiff in the country had standing to challenge it.”

Standing is the legal doctrine that requires plaintiffs to be able to show they have suffered direct and concrete injuries and that those injuries could be resolved in court.

The Murthy – originally Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. – and Kennedy v. Biden cases were consolidated because they shared common legal and factual issues. This allowed them to share processes, such as discovery of evidence. However, they continued to be heard and ruled on separately.

The plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden are much more likely to be able to prove standing than the Murthy v. Missouri plaintiffs, Mack Rosenberg said:

With the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri in the forefront on the issue of standing, we believe that the plaintiffs in our action have clearly demonstrated standing more than sufficient to meet the requirements the Supreme Court described in Murthy in June.

Mack Rosenberg said there is clear evidence that plaintiffs Kennedy and CHD were specific targets of censorship and that they continue to be censored. “CHD in particular continues to be deplatformed from major social media sites with no end in sight.”

She said the facts “demonstrate that the injunction issued by Judge Doughty was appropriate given the circumstances and the government’s continued actions.”

Legal battle has dragged on for over a year

Tuesday’s hearing was the latest development in a class action lawsuit brought by Kennedy, CHD, and Sampognaro on behalf of more than 80 percent of U.S. adults who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, primarily Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (now X).

The suit was filed on March 24, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The case alleged that key officials and federal agencies in the Biden administration violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by censoring online speech disfavored by the government.

According to the complaint, “the federal government’s censorship campaign has repeatedly, systematically, and very successfully targeted constitutionally protected speech on the basis of its content and viewpoint.”

Nearly a year later, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content containing protected free speech.

However, Doughty stayed the injunction until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar injunction in the Murthy v. Missouri case.

After the Supreme Court on June 26 ruled in favor of the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, Doughty on July 9 denied two motions by lawyers for the Biden administration seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction.

Less than 24 hours later, Biden administration lawyers filed an emergency motion with the 5th Circuit, seeking to block the injunction.

The 5th Circuit on July 25 sent the case back to the Louisiana District Court to decide if Kennedy, CHD, and Sampognaro have standing to bring the suit. The 5th Circuit also stayed the injunction while the case was being revisited by the District Court.

The District Court on August 20 gave the plaintiffs the green light to bring their suit, ruling that Kennedy and CHD had standing. Doughty concluded that plaintiff Sampognaro does not have standing.

Lawyers disagree on whether plaintiffs have standing

In Tuesday’s hearing, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Daniel Tenny argued on behalf of the defendants, saying that the Murthy v. Missouri decision “foreclosed” the plaintiffs’ theories on why the plaintiffs have standing.

Rubenfeld disagreed, saying that Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs differ in key ways from the Murthy plaintiffs. First, unlike the Murthy plaintiffs, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have a “specific causation finding,” meaning there is clear evidence that “government defendants, through threats, caused the deplatforming and censorship that they suffered.”

Second, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have evidence of ongoing injury, not just past injury:

CHD’s deplatforming – which happened a couple of years ago – is exactly the same right now, unchanged in status as it was then. In other words, the government defendants are directly responsible for the injury that CHD is currently suffering.

“Number three,” Rubenfeld said, “we have specific evidence of, in the event of a favorable ruling from this court, a significant increase in the likelihood of our plaintiffs receiving relief.”

“That’s the established test for redressability,” he said. Redressability means that the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are likely to be redressed if the court grants the relief the plaintiffs are seeking.

Right now there is zero likelihood that CHD will get relief, Rubenfeld said. “CHD has been litigating against Facebook for years. They have not reinstated them.”

If the 5th Circuit issues a ruling that Facebook’s actions were likely unconstitutional and that will likely be unconstitutional if Facebook keeps on doing it, “that changes [Facebook’s] incentive and that increases the likelihood that [CHD] will be reinstated.”

In their brief, plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued that Sampognaro, who is potentially immunocompromised, has what’s called “right-to-listen standing” because she needs access to accurate information about COVID-19 and possible treatments, and the censorship has obstructed that access.

Tenny urged the court to continue blocking the District Court’s injunction. Rubenfeld argued the injunction is needed because U.S. governmental agencies are “still today” trying to influence social media platforms “to suppress speech that they deem, they call misinformation.”

He added, “But we have seen over and over again that what they call misinformation often doesn’t turn out to be misinformation and turns out to be protected speech.”

The DOJ declined The Defender’s request for comment on October 8’s arguments.

This article was originally published by The Defender – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

Related Topics:#Censorship #FreeSpeech #LifeSiteNews #TheDefender DrSuzanneBurdick RFKVSBiden RobertFKennedy

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New Australian law, if passed, will make the gov’t the sole arbiter of truth’

Published on November 16, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By David James

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it a democracy.

In a crushing blow to free speech in Australia, the lower house of federal parliament has passed an amendment, known as the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. It imposes obligations on digital communications platform providers to prevent the dissemination of content “that contains information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive, and is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm of a specified type (misinformation and disinformation).”

Several dissenting politicians have expressed outrage and incredulity at the legislative move. Nola Marino, a member of the right-wing opposition Liberal Party said that she did not think that Australia, a liberal democratic society, would ever be “debating a bill that is explicitly designed to censor and silence the Australian people.”

National Party member Keith Pitt described the legislation as a “yawning chasm that is incredibly … dangerous to this country.” He expressed shock that the amendment was being put forward, adding that Western democracies such as Australia have been built on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Such principled objections were ignored, however. The legislation now has only to pass in the Senate (the upper house) to become law.

The first and most obvious criticism of the law is that it puts the government authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in the ridiculous position of deciding what is and isn’t “false” information. That is not only absurd – how could ACMA, for example make judgements on subjects like vaccines or viruses – it means that the law cannot be applied universally.

Governments routinely put out false information, arguably more often than they put out true information. Will they be penalized? Of course not. Advertisers present information that is false. Will they fall under his law? No. It will only be directed at people who are saying things that the government does not like, especially in relation to health policy. It is politics, not law.

When governments distort the law for political ends, it inevitably ends up in badly crafted legislation, and that is what has happened here. The law depends for its integrity on clear semantics, words whose definition is clear. But two key words, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading at best.

They are variants of the word “information”; the prefixes “dis” and “mis” have been added to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth (“information” being something objectively observable). It is a diversion. What is happening instead is that the law will target the intent of the writers.

Disinformation is defined as information that is “intended” to mislead and to cause harm. With misinformation there is no such intent; it is just an error, but even there it requires determining what is in the author’s mind. The aim is to outlaw thinking that is not congruent with the governments’ official position.

Pointing out this definitional slipperiness could be the basis for an effective rebuttal of the legislation. Courts are very poor at establishing intent.

A second problem: How do we know what meaning the recipients will get? Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from approbation to intense hostility. To state the obvious, readers think for themselves and inevitably derive different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronizing and infantilizing, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. It is legislation that is not just aimed at controlling the thoughts of the producers of the content, it is targeted at the thoughts of the recipients: two layers of absurdity. The result would be like targeting the “thought crimes” depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Censorship regimes operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of the available content is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. But what matters is the quality of the content, not the quantity of the messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative eventually become meaningless, while sound analyses will cut through.

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. The aim is to ensure that in future health authorities and the political class are immune from scrutiny and criticism. It is unlikely to be effective. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it genuinely a democracy.

Censorship Industrial Complex

CBC continues to push unproven unmarked graves claim, implies ‘denialism’ should be criminalized

Published on November 15, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The CBC has published yet another article implicitly promoting the unproven claim that former residential school sites contain the unmarked graves of Indigenous students, citing activist who want dissent from the official narrative criminalized.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is still pushing the unproven claim that unmarked graves have been discovered at former residential schools while implicitly calling for “residential school denialism” to be criminalized.

In an October 31 article, the state-funded CBC highlighted former residential school attendees who called for punishments for “residential school denialism,” implying citizens should be punished for denying the existence of unmarked graves despite the fact that no bodies have been found.

“Residential school survivors are calling on Canada to criminalize residential school denialism, echoing one of the findings in a report about unmarked graves and burial sites associated with the institutions,” the government-funded outlet claimed.

According to former students of the schools, those who oppose the mainstream narrative, by pointing out that no unmarked graves have been discovered or that some children benefitted from the schools, which some former students themselves have attested, should be silenced.

Alarmingly, this suggestion to criminalize the denial of an unproven claim is supported by a New Democratic Party (NDP) MP who recently introduced a bill which would charge those who “promote hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada.”

While the CBC report rigorously outlines the dangers of so-called “denialism,” it failed to mention the above discrepancies in the official narrative.

Residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set-up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.        

While some children did tragically die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed  that many of the children passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to underfunding by the federal government, not the Catholic Church. 

As a consequence, since 2021, when the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims  that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

In fact, in 2021, Trudeau waited weeks before acknowledging the church vandalism, and when he did speak, said it is “understandable” that churches have been burned while acknowledging it to be “unacceptable and wrong.”   

Similarly, in February, Liberal and NDP MPs quickly shut down a Conservative motion to condemn an attack against a Catholic church in Regina, Saskatchewan. The motion was shut down even though there was surveillance footage of a man, who was later arrested, starting the fire.   

Additionally, in October 2023, Liberal and NDP MPs voted to adjourn rather than consider a motion that would denounce the arson and vandalism against 83 Canadian churches, especially those within Indigenous communities.   