Brownstone Institute
The EU is the Real Culprit of Censorship
From the Brownstone Institute
The Supreme Court recently hearing arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri has refocused attention on the US government’s efforts to get social media platforms to suppress alleged Covid-19 “misinformation” and the issue of whether these efforts crossed the “line between persuasion and coercion” and thus constituted government censorship.
But how could the government’s efforts have not constituted government censorship when it had a full-fledged “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Program” in which all the major online platforms were enrolled and which required them to submit periodic reports outlining, even indeed quantifying, their suppression of what was deemed “false and/or misleading information likely to cause physical harm or impair public health policies?”
The program covered almost the entire official course of the declared Covid-19 pandemic. It was rolled out in early June 2020, just three months after the WHO’s pandemic declaration, and it was only wound up in summer 2022, after most of the measures adopted in response to the pandemic declaration, including various forms of vaccine passports, had already been withdrawn. The participants in the program included Twitter, Facebook/Meta, Google/YouTube, and Microsoft (as owner of Bing and LinkedIn). An archive of the no less than 17 reports which each of them submitted to the government can be seen below.
A presentation of the data submitted specifically by Twitter in its final report can be seen below. Note that the figures given on accounts suspended and pieces of content removed are global figures, i.e. the government censorship program was affecting Twitter users all around the world.
Moreover, the government had already hit several of the participants in the program (Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) with massive fines in antitrust cases in recent years, and the program was being rolled out in conjunction with draft legislation which was practically guaranteed to become law and which gave the government the following powers, among others:
- The power to fine platforms up to 6% of their global turnover if they fail to comply with the government’s censorship demands: i.e. to suppress what the government deems misinformation or disinformation.
- The power to conduct “dawn raids” in case of suspected non-compliance: i.e. to have government agents break into and seal off company premises, inspect books or records in whatever form, and take away copies of or extracts from whatever books or records they deem relevant to their investigation.
- The all-important power, in the context of digital means of communication, to require platforms to provide the government access to their algorithms. This gives the government the opportunity not only to demand open and direct censorship in the form of content removal and account suspension, but also to demand and to influence the more subtle and insidious censorship that takes the form of algorithmic suppression.
In July 2022, the legislation was passed, as expected, and it is now law.
You do not remember this happening? Well, that is not because it did not happen. It did happen. It is because the government in question is not the United States government, but rather the European Commission.
The archive of the Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Program is here, the cited Twitter report is here, the legislation and now law is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which can be consulted here.
It was thus the European Commission which was the driving force behind the wave of censorship which struck Covid-19 dissent from 2020 to 2022, certainly not the Biden administration, whose role was limited to making informal, essentially toothless requests. There was indeed coercion, there was indeed a threat. But it was coming from a different source: it was the looming threat of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
It should be recalled that in Murthy v. Missouri, the US government has argued that it was merely asking platforms to apply their own content moderation policies. So, the question is: Where did those policies come from? “Content moderation” is, after all, just a kinder, gentler euphemism for censorship. Why should the platforms even have “content moderation” policies? Why do they have them?
The answer is that they have them because the European Union has demanded that they have them: first in the context of suppressing “hate speech” and more recently in that of suppressing alleged “disinformation.” The European Commission launched its so-called Code of Practice on Disinformation in 2018, “voluntarily” enrolling all of the major online social media platforms and search engines into it. Was Google, for instance, which the European Commission had just hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion fine – plus a €2.4 billion fine just the year before! – going to refuse to play ball? Of course not.
The Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Programme was a sub-program of the Code of Practice. The Code of Practice would in turn lose its ostensibly “voluntary” character with the passage of the Digital Services Act, as the below European Commission tweet makes perfectly clear.
What is at issue in Murthy v. Missouri is an injunction preventing the US government from communicating with online platforms about “content moderation.” In the meanwhile, however, all the online platforms which signed up to the Code of Practice – and even many which did not but were simply unilaterally designated by the European Commission – have necessarily to be in contact with the latter on their “content moderation” in order to ensure compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The platforms are indeed required to submit periodic reports to the Commission. The Commission is even given the power to demand that the platforms undertake special “content moderation” measures in times of crisis, with a “crisis” being defined as “extraordinary circumstances…that can lead to a serious threat to public security or public health” (preamble, para. 91). Sound familiar?
The 2022 “strengthened” Code of Practice even set up a “Permanent Task Force on Disinformation,” in which representatives of the platforms meet with EU officials at least every six months, as well as in sub-groups in between the plenary sessions. The Task Force is chaired by the European Commission and also, for some reason, includes a representative of the EU foreign service.
So, even supposing the Supreme Court finds in favour of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and upholds the injunction, what will have been gained? The US government will be prevented from talking to the platforms on “content moderation,” but the European Commission, the executive organ of a foreign power, will still be able to do so.
How is that a victory? The European Commission is in fact doing so, systematically and in a formalized manner, because the EU’s Digital Services Act makes it nothing less than the arbiter of what counts as “misinformation” or “disinformation” – the very arbiter of truth and falsity – and the platforms have to satisfy the Commission that they are respecting its judgment in this regard or face the ruinous DSA fines.
The fact of the matter is that Americans’ 1st Amendment rights are already well and truly dead and they are dead because of the actions of a foreign power. Lawsuits targeting the US government will do nothing to change this.
Here is what would: for the US Congress to pass its own law making it a crime for US companies to collaborate with a foreign government in restricting Americans’ speech.
The law could give federal authorities the same draconian powers that the DSA gives the European Commission, but now in the cause of protecting speech rather than suppressing it: (a) the power to apply crippling fines for non-compliance; (b) search-and-seizure powers, so that we can know exactly what communications the companies are having with the European Commission or other foreign powers or governments, rather than having to wait, say, for Elon Musk to kindly divulge them at his discretion; (c) the power to demand access to platform algorithms, so that we can know exactly what and whose speech platforms are surreptitiously, algorithmically suppressing and what and whose speech they are surreptitiously, algorithmically amplifying (which is just the flip side of the same coin).
If the platforms want to stay on both markets, then it would be up to them to find a modus vivendi which allows them to do so: for instance, by geo-blocking content in the EU. Censoring Americans’ speech to meet EU demands would no longer be an option.
Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Adam Kheriarty (all three plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri): Are you going to call for such a law?
Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Representative Thomas Massie: Are you prepared to propose it?
If you truly want to defend Americans’ freedom of speech, then the EU has to be confronted. Attacking the Biden administration for informal contacts with online platforms while staying silent about the EU’s systematic infringement and undermining of Americans’ 1st Amendment rights – and instrumentalizing of American companies to this end! – is not defending freedom of speech. It is grandstanding.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
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