https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.293.0.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46509541)

========

In this case, Plaintiffs allege that Defendants suppressed conservative-leaning free speech, such as: (1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns; (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President Biden.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46509547)

(2) On February 6, 2021, Flaherty requested Twitter to remove a parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter. The request stated, “Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” and “Please remove this account immediately.”23 Twitter suspended the parody account within forty-five minutes of Flaherty’s request.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46509553)

i. Jill Hines and Health Freedom of Louisiana;

ii. One America News;

iii. Breitbart News;

iv. Alex Berenson;

v. Tucker Carlson;

vi. Fox News;

vii. Candace Owens;

viii. The Daily Wire;

ix. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.;

x. Dr. Simone Gold and America’s Frontline Doctors; and

xi. Dr. Joyce Mercula.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46509662)

A federal judge in Louisiana just blew up the White House effort to force social media companies to censor people with opinions (or facts) it doesn't like. This is YUUUGE for Berenson v. Biden.

ALEX BERENSON

JUL 4, 2023

Earlier today, federal Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction barring the White House and several federal agencies from trying to get social media companies from censoring people or posts.

If the post is “protected free speech,” the agencies CANNOT ask Twitter, Facebook, or anyone else to do anything about it, Judge Doughty ruled.

Doesn’t matter if it’s the finest piece of journalism since The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers or the finest piece of journalism since The New York Times published Walter Duranty’s reporting on the 1930s Soviet famines. The White House has no business trying to get it taken down, Judge Doughty wrote in a brilliant 155-page memorandum supporting his injunction in the lawsuit, which the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed against President Biden last year.

It’s Independence Day, all right.

-

(SUPPORT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM ON INDEPENDENCE DAY)

Upgrade to paid

-

On page 102 of the memorandum, Judge Doughty neatly explained the stakes.

“Without a free debate about these issues, each person is unable to decide for himself or herself the proper decision regarding their health. Each United States citizen has the right to decide for himself or herself what is true and what is false. The Government… does not have the right to determine the truth.”

—

(Free speech. It’s as American as apple pie. And Voltaire. Though - ironically - he didn’t say this.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46509994)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHDQfNrOnhE

the second reporter's eyes are so dead as he robotically reads the spin.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510231)

Better yet, don’t— just drop dead instead.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510899)

https://nypost.com/2022/12/19/fbi-biden-campaign-twitter-worked-together-to-suppress-hunter-story/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510900)

were the NY Post links not blocked, banned and suppressed by social media giants?

does not even Jack Dorsey not acknowledge it was wrong?

or maybe you're just flaming?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510963)

This would be major news in saner times

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510923)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR4WBNgGBQU

lol, the expert warns us that the order could have "chilling effects." you don't say! causing chilling effects is a problem? aren't "chilling effects" and even worse outright censorship what the entire case is about?

second expert says "mistakes were made!" but assures us that the ruling is taking a con talking point and making a court ruling about it. (did he not read the meticulous detail in the order itself?)

also the talking heads keep citing "people I've spoken to." who the fuck are these mysterious people? i think we know.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46510983)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renée_DiResta

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511106)

=====

Renée DiResta is the current technical research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory. Formerly, she served as the Director of Research at Yonder (formerly named New Knowledge), a founder of Haven, a logistics company, a venture capitalist at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and a trader at Jane Street Capital.[1] She also worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as an undergraduate college student.[2][3]

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511133)

=====

Federal Judge Limits Biden Officials’ Contacts With Social Media Sites

The order came in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who claim the administration is trying to silence its critics.

The lawsuit named as defendants President Biden and dozens of federal officials.

By Steven Lee Myers and David McCabe

July 4, 2023

A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online.

It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government. Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.

In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

In granting a preliminary injunction, Judge Doughty said that the agencies could not flag specific posts to the social media platforms or request reports about their efforts to take down content. The ruling said that the government could still notify the platforms about posts detailing crimes, national security threats or foreign attempts to influence elections.

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the judge said. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”

Courts are increasingly being forced to weigh in on such issues — with the potential to upend decades of legal norms that have governed speech online.

The Republican attorneys general of Texas and Florida are defending first-of-their-kind state laws that bar internet platforms from taking down certain political content, and legal experts believe those cases may eventually reach the Supreme Court. The high court this year declined to limit a law that allows the platforms to escape legal liability for content that users post to the sites.

The ruling on Tuesday, in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, is likely to be appealed by the Biden administration, but its impact could force government officials, including law enforcement agencies, to refrain from notifying the platforms of troublesome content.

Government officials have argued they do not have the authority to order posts or entire accounts removed, but federal agencies and the tech giants have long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material, especially in cases involving child sexual abuse, human trafficking and other criminal activity. That has also included regular meetings to share information on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

The White House said the Justice Department was reviewing the ruling and evaluating its next steps.

“Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present,” the White House said in a statement.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Twitter did not have a comment, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general, said in a statement that the judge’s order was “historic.” Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, hailed the ruling as a “huge win in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms.” Both officials are Republican.

“What a way to celebrate Independence Day,” Mr. Bailey said on Twitter.

The issue of the government’s influence over social media has become increasingly partisan.

The Republican majority in the House has taken up the cause, smothering universities and think tanks that have studied the issue with onerous requests for information and subpoenas.

The judge’s order bars government agencies from communicating with some of those outside groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project and the Stanford Internet Observatory, in order to induce the removal of protected speech online. Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was involved in leading the two other projects, declined to comment.

Since acquiring Twitter last year, Elon Musk has echoed Republican arguments, releasing internal company documents to chosen journalists suggesting what they claimed was collusion between company and government officials. Though that remains far from proven, some of the documents Mr. Musk disclosed ended up in the lawsuit’s arguments.

The defendants, the social media companies and experts who study disinformation have argued that there is no evidence of a systematic effort by the government to censor individuals in violation of the First Amendment. David Rand, an expert on misinformation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his understanding was that the government had at most a limited impact on how social media platforms engaged with misinformation.

At the same time, emails and text messages made public in the case that Judge Doughty ruled on have shown instances where officials complained to social media executives when influential users spread disinformation, especially involving the coronavirus pandemic.

The states said in their lawsuit that they had a “sovereign and proprietary interest in receiving free flow of information in public discourse on social-media platforms.”

In addition to the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, the case was brought by four other plaintiffs: Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists who questioned the government’s handling of the pandemic; Aaron Kheriaty, a professor dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing to have a coronavirus vaccination; Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that has been accused of disinformation; and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The four additional plaintiffs said social media sites removed some of their posts.

Although the lawsuit named as defendants President Biden and dozens of officials in 11 government agencies, some of the instances cited took place during the Trump administration.

Judge Doughty, who was appointed to the federal court by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, has been sympathetic to conservative cases, having previously blocked the Biden administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned its ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling.

He allowed the plaintiffs extensive discovery and depositions from prominent officials like Anthony S. Fauci, then the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who told the plaintiffs’ lawyers that he was not involved in any discussions to censor content online.

Some experts in First Amendment law and misinformation criticized the Tuesday ruling.

“It can’t be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “If that’s what the court is saying here, it’s a pretty radical proposition that isn’t supported by the case law.”

Mr. Jaffer added that the government has to balance between calling out false speech without stepping into informal coercion that veers toward censorship. “Unfortunately Judge Doughty’s order doesn’t reflect a serious effort to reconcile the competing principles,” he said.

Judge Doughty’s ruling said the injunction would remain in place while proceedings in the lawsuit continued unless he or a higher court ruled differently.

Emma Goldberg contributed reporting.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511149)

======

The Republican majority in the House has taken up the cause, smothering universities and think tanks that have studied the issue with onerous requests for information and subpoenas.

======

i had been told that democracy dies in darkness.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511152)

lol "libs"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511155)

specifically, Ron Klain

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511569)

https://rumble.com/v2ya9to-cnn-legal-expert-on-mo-v-biden-decision-free-speech-is-conservative-ideolog.html

"where's the line??!!" lol

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46511781)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8_lSqf2LVc

Hayes then says that there is no causation -- that there's no evidence that the federal government was shutting down speech -- but take a look at the imgur link above.

then Hayes says he's deeply troubled by forum shopping. well, everyone does it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46513961)

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1676715891738771456

Email from Clarke Humphrey: "am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it [RFK, Jr tweet] removed ASAP"

=======

Clarke Humphrey

ExperienceExperience

The White House logo

Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response TeamDigital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team

The White HouseThe White House

Jan 2021 - Nov 2021 · 11 mosJan 2021 - Nov 2021 · 11 mos

Biden for President logo

Deputy Digital DirectorDeputy Digital Director

Biden for PresidentBiden for President

Jun 2020 - Nov 2020 · 6 mosJun 2020 - Nov 2020 · 6 mos

Democratic National Committee logo

Democratic National CommitteeDemocratic National Committee

2 yrs 1 mo2 yrs 1 mo

Washington D.C. Metro AreaWashington D.C. Metro Area

Director of Online FundraisingDirector of Online Fundraising

Mar 2019 - Jun 2020 · 1 yr 4 mosMar 2019 - Jun 2020 · 1 yr 4 mos

Grassroots Prospects ManagerGrassroots Prospects Manager

Jun 2018 - Mar 2019 · 10 mosJun 2018 - Mar 2019 · 10 mos

Bully Pulpit Interactive logo

AssociateAssociate

Bully Pulpit InteractiveBully Pulpit Interactive

Jul 2017 - May 2018 · 11 mosJul 2017 - May 2018 · 11 mos

Civic Nation logo

Email Director, It's On Us & The United State of WomenEmail Director, It's On Us & The United State of Women

Civic NationCivic Nation

Feb 2017 - Jul 2017 · 6 mosFeb 2017 - Jul 2017 · 6 mos

Washington D.C. Metro Area

=====

btw, Clarke Humphrey is a racist with no impulse control.

https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-these-racist-tweets-from-one-of-bidens-top-covid-officials

https://nypost.com/2022/09/02/biden-administration-asked-instagram-to-take-down-fauci-parody-account-report/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46515333)

https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboning-call-for-proposals

Over the past few years, and particularly over the past few months, questions have arisen about the legitimacy of informal government efforts to persuade, cajole, or strong-arm private platforms to change their content-moderation policies. These informal efforts, sometimes called “jawboning,” take a variety of forms and are undertaken by a variety of actors. Some of them are probably best understood as a legitimate aspect of governance. Others are probably best understood as illegitimate—and possibly unconstitutional—efforts to manipulate or censor public discourse. The latter efforts are especially concerning because platforms often have every incentive to bow to pressure from government actors. The content they are encouraged to suppress is usually not their own, and resisting government pressure can lead to regulatory retaliation.

The First Amendment imposes stringent constraints on the government’s power to regulate speech, but the question of when the First Amendment prohibits government jawboning warrants more attention than it has received thus far. To explore this question and closely related questions, the Knight Institute will host a one-day closed convening at Columbia University on Friday, October 20, 2023. Participants will be asked to write a short (3-5 page) note in advance of the convening addressing relevant empirical questions (the mechanisms of jawboning, the significance of it as a form of censorship), the current landscape of litigation involving jawboning and the platforms, the persuasiveness and adequacy of relevant First Amendment precedents (including Bantam Books v. Sullivan and Blum v. Yaretsky), the proper application of those precedents in new contexts, or the advisability of regulatory reform (e.g., transparency requirements, restrictions on certain types of jawboning). These notes will be shared with participants and published as blog posts on the Knight Institute’s website.

Scholars, practitioners, regulators, platform representatives, and others interested in participating in the convening are invited to submit statements of interest to katy.glennbass@knightcolumbia.org by Friday, July 14, 2023. A statement of interest should be no more than a few paragraphs and should describe the applicant’s relevant background, what specific questions are of most interest to the applicant, what the applicant expects to be able to contribute to the discussion, and how the applicant hopes to use any insights gained from the convening. We anticipate inviting 10-15 people to participate. The Institute will cover participants’ reasonable travel costs. The Institute may also invite some participants to write longer papers for publication by the Knight Institute; invitees who agree to do so will be paid an honorarium.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46516099)

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1676930172270829570

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46519630)

researchers fret

====

Disinformation Researchers Fret About Fallout From Judge’s Order

They said a restriction on government interaction with social media companies could impede efforts to curb false claims about vaccines and voter fraud.

Tiffany HsuStuart A. Thompson

By Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson

July 5, 2023

A federal judge’s decision this week to restrict the government’s communication with social media platforms could have broad side effects, according to researchers and groups that combat hate speech, online abuse and disinformation: It could further hamper efforts to curb harmful content.

Alice E. Marwick, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was one of several disinformation experts who said on Wednesday that the ruling could impede work meant to keep false claims about vaccines and voter fraud from spreading.

The order, she said, followed other efforts, largely from Republicans, that are “part of an organized campaign pushing back on the idea of disinformation as a whole.”

Judge Terry A. Doughty granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, saying the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other parts of the government, must stop corresponding with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who accused Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites of censoring right-leaning content, sometimes in league with the government. They and other Republicans cheered the judge’s move, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, as a win for the First Amendment.

Several researchers, however, said the government’s work with social media companies was not an issue as long as it didn’t coerce them to remove content. Instead, they said, the government has historically notified companies about potentially dangerous messages, like lies about election fraud or misleading information about Covid-19. Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms’ policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves.

“That’s the really important distinction here: The government should be able to inform social media companies about things that they feel are harmful to the public,” said Miriam Metzger, a communication professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of its Center for Information Technology and Society.

A larger concern, researchers said, is a potential chilling effect. The judge’s decision blocked certain government agencies from communicating with some research organizations, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership, about removing social media content. Some of those groups have already been targeted in a Republican-led legal campaign against universities and think tanks.

Their peers said such stipulations could dissuade younger scholars from pursuing disinformation research and intimidate donors who fund crucial grants.

Bond Benton, an associate communication professor at Montclair State University who studies disinformation, described the ruling as “a bit of a potential Trojan horse.” It is limited on paper to the government’s relationship with social media platforms, he said, but carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech.

“Previously, platforms could simply say we don’t want to host it: ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service,’” Dr. Benton said. “This ruling will now probably make platforms a little bit more cautious about that.”

In recent years, platforms have relied more heavily on automated tools and algorithms to spot harmful content, limiting the effectiveness of complaints from people outside the companies. Academics and anti-disinformation organizations often complained that platforms were unresponsive to their concerns, said Viktorya Vilk, the director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, a nonprofit that supports free expression.

“Platforms are very good at ignoring civil society organizations and our requests for help or requests for information or escalation of individual cases,” she said. “They are less comfortable ignoring the government.”

Several disinformation researchers worried that the ruling could give cover for social media platforms, some of which have already scaled back their efforts to curb misinformation, to be even less vigilant before the 2024 election. They said it was unclear how relatively new government initiatives that had fielded researchers’ concerns and suggestions, such as the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, would fare.

For Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the decision on Tuesday underscored other issues: the United States’ “particularly fangless” approach to dangerous content compared with places like Australia and the European Union, and the need to update rules governing social media platforms’ liability. The ruling on Tuesday cited the center as having delivered a presentation to the surgeon general’s office about its 2021 report on online anti-vaccine activists, “The Disinformation Dozen.”

“It’s bananas that you can’t show a nipple on the Super Bowl but Facebook can still broadcast Nazi propaganda, empower stalkers and harassers, undermine public health and facilitate extremism in the United States,” Mr. Ahmed said. “This court decision further exacerbates that feeling of impunity social media companies operate under, despite the fact that they are the primary vector for hate and disinformation in society.”

=====

What happened? A federal judge in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online. The order came in a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who say the administration is trying to silence its critics.

What does the ruling mean? The judge said that parts of the government could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” Government officials could still flag posts detailing crimes, national security threats or foreign attempts to influence elections.

What’s at the core of the lawsuit? Courts are increasingly being forced to weigh in on the issue of the government’s influence over social media. Republicans have at times accused social media sites of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content in collaboration with federal agencies. Democrats argue the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes.

Why does it matter? The order is a major development in the fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online, and it could have significant First Amendment implications. The ruling, which the government has appealed, could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46519895)

"Bond Benton, an associate communication professor at Montclair State University who studies disinformation, described the ruling as “a bit of a potential Trojan horse.” It is limited on paper to the government’s relationship with social media platforms, he said, but carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46523471)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46523890)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.297.1.pdf

Defendants respectfully request that the Court stay its July 4 preliminary injunction pending Defendant’s appeal of that order. See Notice of Appeal, Dkt. 296. The Government faces irreparable harm with each day the injunction remains in effect, as the injunction’s broad scope and ambiguous terms (including a lack of clarity with respect to what the injunction does not prohibit) may be read to prevent the Government from engaging in a vast range of lawful and responsible conduct—including speaking on matters of public concern and working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes. These immediate and ongoing harms to the Government outweigh any risk of injury to Plaintiffs if a stay is granted, and for the same reason, a stay is in the public interest. Moreover, Defendants have shown a substantial case on the merits regarding Plaintiffs’ lack of Article III standing and failure to present evidence substantiating their First Amendment claims. Accordingly, this Court should exercise its discretion to temporarily stay the preliminary injunction during the pendency of Defendants’ Fifth Circuit appeal.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46523893)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.301.0.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46544042)

cr

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46544855)

"We asked Facebook to censor some folks."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46548876)

i am worried the 5th will wade in with, "gosh the government has to be able to push out truthful information!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46548904)

"We botspammed reviews of Sound of Freedom"

"Ok got it. What else did you do?"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46549470)

LJL at retarde GOPcucks thinking that the 5th Circuit was going to save them.

Newsflash: Remember how I kept saying "there is no political solution"?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46549474)

===

Martin Gurri

The New Censorship

How the establishment Left embraced government control of digital speech

/ From the Magazine / The Social Order, Technology and Innovation

Summer 2023

/ Share

On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the “Twitter Files,” the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.

The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power—what Jordan meant by “weaponization.”

According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of “quasi-private” organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming “an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system.” Shellenberger called it the “censorship-industrial complex.”

The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter’s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

At the same time, the speech police protected from criticism members in good standing of the establishment, with a special fondness for Anthony Fauci. It did that for Joe Biden, too, before and after his election to the presidency. There’s no need to repeat here the sordid details of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, but given that the predicate for censorship has been the defense of truth, the bare facts of the story should be noted: the FBI lied to Twitter, and Twitter passed the lie on to the public. If it was a disinformation operation, it succeeded completely.

As Taibbi and Shellenberger observed, these maneuvers were unprecedented in the lifetimes of those assembled at the hearing. Even Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy encountered strong opposition from elements of the political and media establishment. The new censorship seemed to rely on universal elite conformity. No debates had been held, no enabling laws passed. The federal government’s standing legal authority had been used to silence, in secret, the online opinions of an untold number of Americans. Whatever the Republicans’ motivation, one would think this to be a worthy subject of conversation for the House.

Democratic committee members largely ignored the testimony that Taibbi and Shellenberger presented. They showed no interest in discussing the boundaries of free speech. Oscillating in mood between boredom and rage, they treated the two witnesses like war criminals to be badgered and insulted without mercy until they confessed to their awful, if indeterminate, crimes.

Virgin Islands’ delegate Stacey Plaskett, the ranking minority member, opened the prosecution’s case by showing a video of a former Twitter executive complaining that he had to sell his house because of the Twitter Files. Then she seemed to accuse Taibbi and Shellenberger of terrorism: “you represent a direct threat to people who oppose you.” The word “threat,” it should be understood, carries a specific and ominous meaning in government.

“The Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression.”

Other charges followed. Taibbi and Shellenberger were “Elon Musk’s chosen scribes,” bought and paid for “to promote his chosen narrative.” Because they were “Republican witnesses,” they could not claim any credibility as journalists—they were “so-called journalists.” Because they served as stooges for Musk, they facilitated the work of Russian agents. At one point, Dan Goldman (D-NY) insisted that, as a kind of loyalty oath, Taibbi endorse two of Robert Mueller’s indictments of Russian entities. When Taibbi observed that indictments were charges, not proof of guilt, Goldman, who has a law degree, imperiously cut him off: “Let me move on. . . . That’s how this works. You should know this by now.”

The two witnesses found themselves accused of selling out for fame and more Twitter followers. They had unleashed “Trump and other MAGA extremists to post incessant lies.” Their most appalling crime, however, was disrespecting the establishment. When Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL) proclaimed, “I support the FBI and our law enforcement agencies,” she seemed to imply that the highest duty of every patriotic American was devotion to the established order.

I happen to know Taibbi and Shellenberger, as well as Bari Weiss, another author of the Twitter Files. They are independent souls. None is a Republican; all three began life as liberal Democrats and are now, in Weiss’s phrase, “politically homeless.”

But nobody was really expected to believe the accusations hurled at them in the hearing, least of all the accusers, which probably accounts for the listlessness that prevailed between bursts of performative anger. What, then, motivated the House Democrats to such a determined exercise in personal destruction? Many possible explanations arise. The kindest would be that they found the issue to be a loser and wanted to change the subject. A psychological theory might propose that they lapsed into a state of political psychosis, striking wildly at those who punctured their fantasies.

The worst-case scenario, to which I subscribe, is that the Democrats were acting on principle. Their behavior reflected, quite faithfully, their current understanding of government.

Historically, the American approach to freedom of speech was Jeffersonian in spirit. The supreme threat to freedom, on this view, was the power and heft of government, against which the individual must be defended by a wall of inviolable and inalienable rights. The First Amendment has nothing to say about abuses by private persons or groups but enjoins Congress to “make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.” This is the argument that Jordan was trying to make with his talk of weaponization.

The modern Left espoused a radical version of Jeffersonian individualism. Born at Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, it considered the primary threat to democracy to lie in the great hierarchical institutions like the university, the corporation, and government. The struggle pitted the individual against the machine-like inhumanity of the industrial age. Mario Savio, the movement’s leader, told his comrades: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop.”

A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.

Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.

The ideology of control has a long history, harking back to the Republic of Plato and the vanguard parties of Marxism-Leninism. The American version, absorbed by the House Democrats and the establishment Left generally, emerged out of the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era and was best articulated by Walter Lippmann.

Lippmann was a true Platonist. His experience with propaganda in World War I convinced him that public opinion could be manufactured by nefarious “invisible hierarchies.” The ordinary citizen, he believed, was hopelessly gullible and ignorant. Modern government must therefore depend on “specially trained” experts, possessors of “technical knowledge,” who represented not just the voters but “people who are not voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and people.”

How this guardian class would be reconciled with democracy Lippmann never worked out. Fatefully, and with more than a hint of despair, he wrote: “The problems that vex democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic means.” The implication was clear. To save democracy, “specially trained” elites had to control it.

The Weaponization of Government spectacle played out under the shadow of the digital storm. Information had burst its institutional boundaries and escaped elite control. Predators could presumably feast, untroubled, on helpless victims. By far the most catastrophic event associated with all of this was the rise and fall and potential return of Donald Trump.

For today’s guardian class, Trump was the quintessential problem of democracy that could be solved only by undemocratic means. Three months after his election, he was under investigation for conspiring with Russian agents. According to journalist Jeff Gerth, half a million news stories were produced on the subject of Trump–Russia collusion—a volume that, if true, suggests a pathological level of obsessive compulsion. Failure to find guilt merely confirmed Trump’s supervillain powers. A barrage of accusations, impeachments, and indictments has targeted Trump since 2016; the thinking seems to be that, sooner or later, someone will find him guilty of something. That is probably correct.

But the establishment Left faced a second and more complex problem of democracy: how to control social media, which they believed had lifted Trump to power and might do the same for other dangerous carnivores of the Party of Lies. The new censorship began with certain dogmatic assertions heard in opaque corners of the federal bureaucracy. The key concept was “disinformation,” defined as lying deliberately to some adversary. Influence operations were conflated with attempts by foreign players to hack U.S. government information systems, such as election records; the Russians hovered like phantoms over the scene. Very quickly, telling fibs online got ratcheted into a national security crisis under the purview of Homeland Security.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provided the “experts” to justify this effort. Many of the NGOs working the issue, like the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council, received federal funds—but all sowed panic about disinformation, and all demanded government regulation of social media. Here is Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, testifying before the Senate in a typical example of NGO alarmism: “Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war. . . . This will be one of the defining threats of our generation.” Also typically, DiResta recommended a “whole-of-government defense strategy” that included a Cold War–sounding “international detection and deterrence strategy.”

The NGOs developed the umbrella conclaves where personnel from federal agencies like Homeland Security, the FBI, and State Department inducted their social-media “partners” into the mysteries of digital orthodoxy. Government instruction occurred both face-to-face and through confidential messaging channels. Among the most influential groups were the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project, both spawned by the Stanford Internet Observatory, which monitored millions of posts across platforms and were responsible for two specific expansions of the field of play.

First, they dropped the pretense of protection against foreign conspirators to focus on domestic content. “Domestic threat actors,” whose fraudulent posts were considered to be an attack on “democratic institutions,” replaced the ghost-like Russians in the priorities of Homeland Security. Second, they transitioned from disinformation—that is, the fig leaf of fighting falsehood—to the censoring of uncomfortable truths. Accurate criticism of Anthony Fauci that might “exacerbate distrust,” “true stories that might fuel hesitancy” about the Covid-19 vaccine, along with heretical though feasible opinions about the Ukraine war and U.S. elections, became viewed as actionable.

Now there were good truths and bad truths. In cases like that of the Hunter Biden laptop, noble lies had to be told to solve the problems of democracy. The new censorship sidestepped the old legal niceties: warrants, judges, formal investigations. It was a bureaucratic process. As such, it was self-justified, secretive, and open-ended.

The chronology is significant. Most pieces of the system came to life early in the Trump administration. The pandemic proved an incubator and accelerator of government control of digital speech. Personal reports of vaccine aftereffects, talk of natural immunity, and, of course, any suggestion that the virus had been “leaked from a lab” came under scrutiny: this was the moment when truth became relative. By the 2020 election campaign, as we have seen, Trump, the sitting president, had been deamplified on Twitter. The January 6 disorders took this trend a step further—at last, as the elites had believed all along, Trumpism could be equated with treason.

With the ascent of Joe Biden to the presidency, the system achieved something like maturity. Biden was a believer—and a practitioner. He accused the digital platforms of “killing people” with disinformation, and he demanded, successfully, that Twitter exile critics and political opponents. The bureaucrats could finally come out of the closet, but uncertainty remained as to how centralized and visible to the public the system should be.

NGOs like the Virality Project and the Aspen Institute’s Information Disorder Commission came down hard in favor of a “centralized national response strategy,” with “clearly-defined roles and responsibilities across the Executive Branch.” After some hesitation, the administration agreed. In April 2022, Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of Homeland Security, announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board, headed by Nina Jankowicz. Incredibly, Jankowicz, a creature of the NGO world, had promoted the Russian hack misdirection play during the laptop controversy. She could be found on TikTok claiming to be “the Mary Poppins of disinformation” and elsewhere online singing lewd songs.

Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board self-detonated, and it is instructive to grasp why. The news media blamed Republican opposition. The ridiculous Jankowicz played a part in the disaster. But the board failed mainly because the administration imagined such an agency to have self-evident value and was totally unprepared for the torrent of criticism that flooded in. Few Americans want federal governance of information. The establishment Left, conversely, can’t survive politically without control of the web—and it dwells in a dim institutional bubble where self-interest is forever confused with the salvation of democracy.

While digital chaos and Trumpian turbulence formed the deep background to the Weaponization of Government circus, the presidential election of 2024 loomed like a reckoning in the near distance.

Desperate to break the Democrats’ hold on our culture, Republicans like Jordan aim to ride the First Amendment to escape their media ghetto and reach the large majorities required to win national office again. That is a reasonable strategy—but ours is an unreasonable age. The Republicans are caught in a circular dilemma: they need the presidency to be heard above the censorship, yet the censorship radically diminishes their chances of getting to the White House. Even Trump, despite his extraordinary ability to hold the attention of the news media, in the end was punished with the mute button.

The Democratic Party is the natural home of the establishment Left. To this arrangement, the Left brings apparent advantages like the reflexive applause of the New York Times, but also, less evidently, a heavy load of ideological baggage. Its doctrines tend to be unpopular even among Democrats. Most blacks oppose defunding the police, for example. Most Hispanics disapprove of open borders. Most Democrats don’t believe that grievance should trump merit. If put to a vote, these propositions would lose. The Left must therefore transform them into moral commandments, beyond the reach of politics. In the digital age, this can be accomplished only by policing and controlling the Web—and censorship of that magnitude is possible only if Biden or some other Democrat holds the presidency after 2024.

From the Democrats’ perspective, the portents look grim. The loss of Twitter to Elon Musk was a terrible blow. The condemnation of free speech that attended Twitter’s sale astonished many of us; we can now see that it was driven by foreknowledge that the new censorship, so discreetly implemented, was about to be exposed. The loss of the House reminded Democrats of the eternal problem of democracy. Other means of control will be preferred, with the serial prosecution of Trump serving as the model. The IRS thus paid a surprise visit to Taibbi’s New Jersey home while he was testifying in Washington. The FTC hit Musk with “more than 350 specific demands” for information, including all the juicy details of Twitter’s dealings with journalists like “Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger.” As we swing into campaign mode, we should expect an upsurge of creativity along this front.

Both parties, for good reasons, fear an electoral disaster. Neither remembers that we have faced this choice before. The Sedition Act of 1798, concocted during the presidency of John Adams, made it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States”—a precept that the Party of Truth might find congenial today. But Jefferson, in the course of time, defeated Adams, declared in his inaugural address that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,” and dominated American politics with his vision for the next century and more.

It is painful, and possibly unfair, to place Jefferson and Adams side by side with Biden and Trump. By any standard, the latter are too old, too small, too failed. Beyond the crooked timber of our political humanity, however, we come to a contest of principles: the Jeffersonian tradition is being challenged by a new vision of government oversight of digital speech. Powerful and influential Americans, like the House Democrats, insist on the superiority of the principle of control, and they have pushed our institutions far in that direction. The next presidential election will determine whether the rest of the nation agrees.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46560676)

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The Federal Trade Commission inappropriately pressured an independent third-party auditing firm to find Twitter had violated the terms of its settlement agreement with the FTC, a motion filed last week in federal court reveals. That misconduct and the FTC’s own repudiation of the terms of the settlement agreement entitle Twitter to vacate the consent order, its lawyers maintain.

This latest development holds significance beyond Twitter’s fight with the FTC, however, with the details providing further evidence that the Biden administration targeted Twitter because of its owner Elon Musk’s support for free speech on his platform.

I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency.

Roque’s testimony prompted attorneys for Twitter to seek documents from the FTC to assess whether the federal agency had repeated its pressure campaign with EY’s successors, but the agency refused to provide any details to the social media giant. Twitter responded last week by filing a “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order.”

That motion and its accompanying exhibits provide shocking details of an abusive agency targeting Twitter. When those facts are coupled with the report on the FTC issued earlier this year by the House Weaponization Subcommittee, it seems clear the Biden administration is targeting Twitter because Musk seceded from the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

FTC’s Pre-Musk Enforcement Actions

Thursday’s motion began with the background necessary to appreciate the gravity of the FTC’s scorched-earth campaign against Twitter.

More than a decade ago, the FTC entered into a settlement agreement with Twitter after finding Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by misrepresenting the extent it protected user information from unauthorized access. That 2011 settlement agreement resulted in a consent order that required Twitter to establish a “comprehensive information security program” that met specific parameters. The 2011 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment from an independent third-party professional confirming compliance with the terms of the settlement agreement.

From 2011 to 2019, Twitter operated under the 2011 consent order and received about 10 “demand letters” from the FTC seeking additional information. Then in October 2019, Twitter informed the FTC that “some email addresses and phone numbers provided for account security may have been used unintentionally for advertising purposes.” In investigating that report, the FTC sent Twitter another 15 or so demand letters over a two-year period before filing a complaint in a California federal court on May 25, 2022, alleging Twitter had violated the 2011 consent order and Section 5 of the FTC Act by misrepresenting the extent to which Twitter maintained and protected the privacy of nonpublic consumer information.

The next day, the court entered a “Stipulated Order” — meaning Twitter and the FTC had agreed to the terms of that order — “for Civil Penalty, Monetary Judgment, and Injunctive Relief.” That stipulated order allowed the FTC to reopen the 2011 proceeding and enter an updated consent order, which created a new “compliance structure.”

Under the 2022 order, Twitter was required to establish and maintain a “comprehensive privacy and information security program” to “protect[] the privacy, security, confidentiality, and integrity” of certain user information by Nov. 22, 2022. The 2022 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment of its compliance with the terms of the court order by “qualified, objective, independent third-party professionals.”

Musk Makes Waves

Musk entered into an agreement on April 25, 2022, to purchase Twitter, effective Oct. 27, 2022, and one must wonder if that April agreement prompted Twitter’s then-management to enter the May 2022 consent decree, as Twitter’s prior management handcuffed Musk to the terms of the agreement forged with the FTC. Either way, the May 2022 consent order governed Twitter’s operations under Musk’s new management.

While the 2022 consent decree remained unchanged after Musk’s purchase became final, the FTC’s posture toward Twitter changed drastically. As Twitter’s Thursday motion detailed, “in the five months between the signing of the Consent Order on May 25, 2022, and Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Inc. on October 27, 2022, the FTC sent Twitter only three demand letters.”

All three letters concerned a whistleblower’s claims that Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and the 2011 consent order by making false and misleading statements about its security, privacy, and integrity. The FTC waited nearly two months after receiving the whistleblower’s complaint before serving its first demand letter on Twitter.

FTC Goes Scorched Earth

According to Twitter’s motion for relief from the 2022 consent order, “Musk’s acquisition of Twitter produced a sudden and drastic change in the tone and intensity of the FTC’s investigation into the company.” Among other things, the FTC publicly stated it was “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.” The FTC also stressed that the revised consent order provided the agency with “new tools to ensure compliance,” and it was “prepared to use them.”

And use them the FTC did: The agency immediately issued two demand letters to Twitter seeking information about workforce reductions and the launch of Twitter Blue. Those demand letters came before Twitter was even required under the 2022 consent decree to have its new programs in place. Since then, Twitter’s attorneys note, the FTC has pummeled Twitter’s corporate owner, X Corp., with “burdensome demand letters” — more than 17 separate demand letters, with some 200 individual demands for information and documents, translates into a new demand letter every two weeks.

FTC Starts Drilling Former Employees

In addition to the FTC’s flurry of demand letters, it began deposing former Twitter employees — five to date — and is currently seeking to question Musk. The FTC also deposed Roque on June 21, 2023, but the questioning backfired. Twitter learned from that deposition, as its lawyers put it in Thursday’s motion, “that the FTC’s harassment campaign was even more extreme and far-reaching than it had imagined.”

Roque was the Ernst & Young partner overseeing the assessment it was hired by Twitter to perform — an assessment mandated by the May 2022 consent decree. Twitter’s previous management retained EY in July 2022 to issue the assessment report of its security measures.

In late February 2023, EY withdrew from the engagement. Many of the FTC’s questions to Roque probed the reasoning for the withdrawal, including the high number of personnel changes and EY’s difficulty in starting the assessment because of Twitter upheaval caused by Musk’s changes.

Deposition Backfires Big Time

During the FTC’s question of Roque about EY’s withdrawal from the engagement and various emails exchanged by partners, the longtime CPA dropped a bombshell: The FTC had so pressured Roque to reach its preconceived conclusion that Twitter had violated the consent decree that Roque sought help researching the ethical standards that govern CPAs to assess whether EY’s independence had been compromised.

Roque revealed that detail when the FTC’s lawyer quizzed him on the meaning of a chat message exchange he had with fellow EY partner Paul Penler on the evening of Feb. 21, 2023, shortly before the Big Four firm announced it was withdrawing from its engagement to assess Twitter’s compliance with the 2022 consent order.

While the actual chat message was filed under seal as Exhibit 16 in support of Twitter’s motion, the transcript of Roque’s questioning was provided to the court, revealing the pertinent aspects of the conversation.

Roque began by asking Penler, “Where is the best place to confirm independence consideration for attest engagement?” About 15 minutes later, Roque followed up by asking whether specific language about an “adverse interest threat” “could work for Twitter?” Roque then commented to Penler that “EY interests are not aligned with Twitter anymore because of the FTC.”

Mild-Mannered CPA Drops Bombshell

After showing Roque a copy of his chat exchange with Penler, the FTC attorney quizzed the EY partner on why he had sent the note and what he meant by the various lines. That’s when the bomb exploded, with Roque explaining he had contacted Penler — who was with EY’s professional practice group, the internal group that was responsible for ensuring the firm adequately followed professional standards — because Roque had concerns about whether the FTC had threatened his independence.

“As we were moving forward with this engagement, we had ongoing discussions with the FTC,” Roque explained. “[D]uring those discussions,” Roque continued, “the FTC kept expressing their opinion more and more adamantly about the extent of procedures Ernst & Young would need to perform based on their expectations. And there was also expectations around the results they would expect us to find based on the information Twitter had already provided to the FTC and the FTC had reviewed.”

Those conversations, Roque testified, made him feel “as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” so he was attempting to assess whether EY had an “adverse threat,” meaning “somebody outside of the arrangement we had with Twitter trying to influence the outcome of our results.”

FTC Spin Falls Flat

After Roque revealed his concerns about the FTC’s conduct, the lawyer for the federal agency pushed him to backtrack by asking leading questions. Rather than hedge, Roque stood firm, as these exchanges show:

FTC Attorney: “To be clear, no one from the FTC directed you to reach a particular conclusion about Twitter’s 22 program, correct?”

Roque: “There was suggestions of what they would expect the outcome to be.”

* * *

FTC Attorney: “No one from the FTC actually told you what EY’s report should say in its conclusions, correct?”

Roque: “There was a conversation where it was conveyed that the FTC would be surprised if there was areas on our report that didn’t have findings based on information the FTC was already aware of, and if Ernst & Young didn’t have findings in those areas, we should expect the FTC would follow up very significantly to understand why we didn’t have similar conclusions.”

Twitter’s Lawyer Pounces

After two fails, the FTC moved on to other questions, but Twitter’s lawyer, Daniel Koffmann, returned to the topic when it was his turn to question Roque. Koffmann asked Roque whether there was a particular meeting with the FTC in which the agency had given him the impression that it “was expecting a certain outcome in the assessment that Ernst & Young was conducting relative to Twitter’s compliance with the consent order.”

Roque mentioned two meetings. He described the first, which was in December 2022, as “interesting” and “surprising” because when EY noted that Twitter, under its new ownership, might opt to terminate its contract with the firm, the FTC was “very adamant about this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day.” Roque found the FTC’s stance “a bit surprising,” since the report was not due for another six to seven months and the federal agency would not know what might transpire during that time period.

Roque further explained that he found the December 2022 meeting “unusual” because the FTC provided “specificity on the execution of very specific types of procedures that they expected to be performed.”

“It was almost as if they were giving us components of our audit program to execute,” Roque said. While EY could perform such a review, it would be a different type of engagement than the one it had entered with Twitter. Rather, EY’s assessment for Twitter was to access, for instance, how security operates and how the user administration process is managed. In conducting that assessment, the firm would look at specific controls. But the FTC was giving EY very specific tests to run, which was inconsistent with a typical audit, Roque explained.

It was the second meeting, which took place in January 2022, that raised real concerns for Roque. It was then, Roque said, that the FTC “started providing areas that they were expecting us to look at.” Roque testified that the FTC “communicated that they would expect Ernst & Young to have findings or exceptions or negative results in certain areas based on what they already understood from an operational standpoint, based on information Twitter had provided, and that if we ended up producing a report that didn’t have findings in those areas, that they would be surprised, and they would be definitely following up with us to understand why we didn’t — why we reached the conclusions we did if they were sort of not reflecting gaps in the controls.”

Roque would go on to agree with Twitter’s attorney that during the January 2022 meeting, “the representatives from the FTC expressed that they believed Ernst & Young’s assessment would lead to findings or exceptions about Twitter’s compliance with the consent order.”

Twitter Takes FTC to Task

A little over a week after Roque’s deposition, Twitter’s legal team wrote the FTC a scathing letter noting that Roque’s alarming testimony “demonstrates that the FTC has resorted to bullying tactics, intimidation, and threats to potential witnesses.”

“It strongly suggests that the FTC has attempted to exert improper influence over witnesses in order to manufacture evidence damaging to X Corp. and Mr. Musk,” the letter continued, adding that Roque’s testimony also raised serious questions about whether the FTC’s bias would render any future enforcement action unconstitutional.

The Twitter letter ended by requesting documents and information from the FTC “to evaluate the nature and scope of the FTC’s misconduct and the remedial measures that will be necessary.” Among other things, Twitter asked for communications between FTC personnel and the company that succeeded EY as Twitter’s independent assessor, as well as another company Twitter considered but did not select to replace EY.

The FTC refused Twitter’s request. In its letter denying Musk access to any documents, Reenah L. Kim, the same attorney who allegedly made the statements to Roque, claimed Twitter’s accusations of so-called “bullying tactics, intimidation, and threats to potential witnesses” by the FTC “are completely unfounded.”

Lots of Legal Implications

Following the FTC’s refusal to provide Twitter the requested documents, Musk’s legal team filed its “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order” with the California federal court where the 2022 consent decree had been entered. In this recently filed motion, Musk’s attorneys argue the FTC “breached” the consent order when it attempted “to dictate and influence the content, procedures, and outcome” of the court-ordered assessment, which the consent decree required to be both “objective” and “independent.”

To support its argument, Twitter highlighted the FTC’s own language in an earlier letter the agency had sent to Twitter’s prior management team discussing the importance of the same “independence” requirement from the first consent decree. That order was clear, the FTC wrote, that “Twitter must obtain periodic security assessments ‘from a qualified, objective, independent third-party professional.’”

The “assessor must be an independent third party — not an employee or agent of either Twitter or the FTC,” the letter continued, adding that if the auditor were indeed an agent of Twitter, “Twitter would be in violation of the Order’s requirement that it obtain a security assessment from an ‘independent third-party’ professional.” The FTC then stressed: “The very purpose of a security or privacy order’s assessment provision is to ensure that evaluation of a respondent’s security or privacy program is truly objective — i.e., unaffected by the interests (or litigation positions) of either the respondent or the FTC.”

The FTC’s interference with EY’s independence thus constituted a violation of the 2022 consent decree, Twitter’s legal team argued, justifying the court vacating that order — or at a minimum modifying it. Twitter also argued in its motion that as a matter of fairness, the consent decree should be set aside given the FTC’s outrageously aggressive demands for documents, compared to its posture toward Twitter prior to Musk’s purchase.

That motion remains pending before federal Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon, with a hearing set for next month.

Connection to the Censorship Complex

While Twitter’s Thursday motion does not directly connect to the Censorship-Industrial Complex, the FTC’s posture toward Twitter changed following news that Musk intended to purchase the tech giant to make it a free-speech zone. And when Roque’s testimony is considered against the backdrop of evidence previously exposed by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, it seems clear the Biden administration sought to punish Twitter for exiting from the government’s whole-of-society plan to censor supposed misinformation.

The House subcommittee’s March 2023 report, titled “The Weaponization of the Federal Trade Commission: An Agency’s Overreach to Harass Elon Musk’s Twitter,” established the FTC had requested the names of every journalist Musk had provided access to internal communications, which had led to the earth-shattering revelations contained in the “Twitter Files.” Many of the FTC’s other demands, the House report concluded, also “had little to no nexus to users’ privacy and information.” The report thus concluded that the “strong inference” “is that Twitter’s rediscovered focus on free speech [was] being met with politically motivated attempts to thwart Elon Musk’s goals.”

Know-Nothing Khan

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, attempted to question FTC Chair Lina Khan on Thursday about the agency’s apparent interference with EY’s independence and its connection to the federal government’s efforts to silence speech.

“The FTC has engaged in conduct so irregular and improper that Ernst & Young (‘EY’) — the independent assessor designated under a consent order between Twitter and the FTC to evaluate the company’s privacy, data protection, and information security program — ‘felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,’” Jordan said.

But Khan claimed she knew nothing about Roque or his deposition testimony.

That doesn’t change the fact that the FTC has been laser-focused on Twitter since Musk revolted against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Whether Twitter will convince the California federal court that the FTC’s conduct justifies tearing up the consent decree, however, remains to be seen.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist's senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

here's the letter from Quinn to the FTC:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.396016/gov.uscourts.cand.396016.18.18.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46560782)

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“We were under pressure from the administration,” a Facebook employee emailed to Nick Clegg, a senior company executive, after he asked why the company had censored the Covid lab leak theory. “We shouldn’t have done it.”

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MSM: i see nothing!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46602125)

If the company did not bend, it faced “protracted and increasing animosity” with the White House at a time when it had “bigger fish to fry with the Administration,” Clegg wrote. “That doesn’t seem a great place for us to be.”

In other words, a senior Facebook executive said the company might give into unconstitutional censorship demands because the federal government had other levers on it. Ultimately, Facebook did knuckle to the pressure and significantly increased its censorship and suppression of vaccine-skeptical posts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46602152)

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1684923249790984197

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46605072)

=====

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/appeals-judges-compare-biden-social-media-pressure-mafia-supervisor

'Strong-arming:' Appeals court judges compare Biden social media pressure to mafia

Federal officials appeared to practice "fairly unsubtle strong-arming" social media companies into censorship, appellate judge says, likening them to mafia. Censorship is ongoing against Louisiana officials, state claims.

Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod declared in court that the Biden administration's efforts to persuade social media companies to remove, throttle and suppress purported misinformation on COVID-19, Hunter Biden's laptop and elections reminded her of a mafia movie.

That was just one of the most memorable examples of the frosty reception Justice Department Civil Division lawyer Daniel Tenny received Thursday from the three-judge panel considering whether to lift or modify last month's ban on several forms of contact between the feds and companies — currently stayed by the 5th Circuit — as the First Amendment lawsuit led by Missouri and Louisiana proceeds.

The back-and-forth at Thursday's hearing resembled that between 6th Circuit judges and DOJ's lawyer at a June hearing in a related social media censorship lawsuit against federal officials by users of X, formerly known as Twitter. Both panels were appointed by Republican presidents.

Echoing the injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, the 5th Circuit judges repeatedly cited specific conversations from the factual record that suggest social media companies feared legal consequences for not complying with White House and agency requests to censor or diminish the reach of websites or social media postings of which the Biden administration disapproved.

When Tenny claimed the injunction's wording was so broad and vague it could ban the government from alerting the public about "untrue statements" about a natural disaster, Judge Don Willett countered that documented private conversations were the issue.

Federal officials appeared to practice "fairly unsubtle strong-arming" and make "not-so-veiled threats" in the vein of "this is a really nice social media platform you've got there, would be a shame if something happened to it," Willett said.

Tenny, upon hearing what the judges appeared to be interpreting as coercive pressure, tried to soft pedal the severity of that pressure. "The government is generically going to be angry" when companies resist taking action, but the communications show officials and companies alternating between "friendly" and "testy" conversations, not specific orders to comply "or else."

Judge Elrod didn't seem particularly convinced, telling Tenny that "Or else" isn't required when the government and companies have a "very close working relationship" that resembles a supervisor addressing a subordinate. The "irate messages" actually show high-ranking officials badgering counterparts about why they hadn't taken action against specific accounts as requested, Judge Elrod said: "It's like 'jump and how high.'"

Drilling down on that issue, and pointing to COVID claims specifically, Elrod queried if high-level government officials asked companies "in a coercive manner to propagate certain things that the government knew were untrue, and to deamplify certain things that it knew were true … but didn't fit its message, would that be able to be enjoined?"

Tenny responded that the question presumes the government acted coercively, and denied any factual evidence, adding that President Biden cannot unilaterally remove legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act or launch antitrust actions against noncompliant platforms, referring to two possibilities White House officials had earlier floated.

"Time and again," what the government labels as mis-, dis- and malinformation, "always with great fervor," is vindicated as true, Willett said. Elrod pointed to then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins' internal request to issue a published takedown of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration. Tenny tried to downplay the government's influence, say that Collins merely asked to rebut its "premises."

Tenny also said the judges could not consider a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by leading House Republicans, including members of the Judiciary and Weaponization of the Federal Government committees. That amicus brief lays out much of the "[v]ery recent evidence" their investigations had obtained that they claim "further corroborates" the factual basis for Doughty's injunction.

Tenny then argued that the state plaintiffs don't even have legal standing to bring the case because the officials who claim their own posts were censored haven't alleged they plan to make similar posts in the future, showing no "ongoing injury," which is a requisite element of injunctive relief. "A lot has changed" since the suit was filed, including Elon Musk's purchase of then-Twitter and elimination of its COVID misinformation policy, with no subsequent "retribution" by the feds, he said.

Asked by Judge Edith Brown Clement if the feds were still communicating with social media platforms, Tenny clarified he wasn't claiming they "entirely stopped" but evaded whether they maintained "day-to-day involvement."

Attorney John Sauer, representing the State of Louisiana, asked the judges what they would think of a senior White House staffer contacting Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers to participate in a "book-burning program" focused on authors who criticize the administration, with the companies only giving in after months of escalating White House rhetoric.

That's exactly what the White House did to compel platforms to remove and throttle the "most persuasive speakers" critical of its policies, such as former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Sauer said.

Sauer added that the appellate court should indeed take "judicial notice" of the congressional amicus brief because there's no dispute on the authenticity of the newly identified communications and it "powerfully reinforces" the alleged coercion, such as a Facebook official suggesting the company back down because of "bigger fish we have to fry" with the administration.

Even if the platforms were inclined to remove purported misinformation of their own accord, the "timing" shows they acted against Louisiana specifically after federal pressure, Sauer claimed, citing YouTube's removal of a video uploaded by a state Department of Justice official that featured Louisiana residents discussing COVID mandates.

Louisiana can demonstrate ongoing injuries under multiple theories, Sauer said: direct censorship of its officials; "sovereign interest" in hearing its constituents' social-media views on matters of public concern; in "fair, free, unbiased processes" to petition the government; and injury to a "substantial part of our population."

Sauer noted that one of the individual plaintiffs, Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines, claimed as recently as May that Facebook keeps taking down groups she created to protest COVID policies. YouTube briefly removed a panel discussion about the case featuring Sauer just last month, he noted.

"This notion that COVID censorship is over is completely unsupportable," Sauer said.

The 5th Circuit did not indicate when a written opinion would be forthcoming.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46655988)

5th Circuit affirms most of the trial court. but they do let key parts of the government keep pushing censorship.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-administration-likely-violated-first-amendment-with-social-media-censorship-appeals-court-rules/

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment by pressuring social-media platforms to censor posts about Covid-19 and elections.

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The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling says that the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel of three judges found that the administration “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

A lower court previously placed restrictions on the Biden administration’s communications with social-media platforms; those restrictions applied to a number of government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

After temporarily blocking the order, the Fifth Circuit judges have now modified the order to apply only to the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI.

The judges found that the agencies it has since exempted “were permissibly exercising government speech.”

“That distinction is important because the state-action doctrine is vitally important to our Nation’s operation — by distinguishing between the state and the People, it promotes ‘a robust sphere of individual liberty,’” the judges wrote.

While the Biden White House and CDC allegedly pressured Facebook and YouTube to adopt specific policies around Covid-19 and vaccination-related information, the judges noted the FBI regularly met with tech companies ahead of the 2020 elections. The agency’s activities were “not limited to purely foreign threats,” as the FBI flagged posts that originated inside the U.S. as well, including those that contained incorrect poll hours or mail-in voting procedures.

The court’s decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri last year.

Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey celebrated the decision in a post on X, saying it would prevent federal officials “from violating the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46774752)

transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly

every major American social-media company about the spread of

“misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—

hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—

urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their

sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access

to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and

deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to

capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation

activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the

2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.

Enter this lawsuit. The Plaintiffs—three doctors, a news website, a

healthcare activist, and two states1

—had posts and stories removed or

downgraded by the platforms. Their content touched on a host of divisive

topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine sideeffects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Plaintiffs

maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government

officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and

pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private

communications and legal threats. So, they sued the officials2

for First

Amendment violations and asked the district court to enjoin the officials’

conduct. In response, the officials argued that they only “sought to mitigate

the hazards of online misinformation” by “calling attention to content” that

violated the “platforms’ policies,” a form of permissible government speech.

The district court agreed with the Plaintiffs and granted preliminary

injunctive relief. In reaching that decision, it reviewed the conduct of several

federal offices, but only enjoined the White House, the Surgeon General, the

CDC, the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

(NIAID), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and

the Department of State. We briefly review—per the district court’s order

and the record—those officials’ conduct.

https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Doc.-238-1-Fifth-Circuit-Opinion.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46775039)

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23977681/appeal-in-social-media-case.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5368031&forum_id=2#46820254)