WASHINGTON – The Biden administration slams back after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested without evidence that baseball legend Hank Aaron's death in 2021 was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. did.
In an email to Twitter officials, the White House's coronavirus task force's digital director said: “We would like to flag the following tweets and are wondering if we can take steps to remove them as quickly as possible. “
What the White House viewed as an effort to correct misinformation about lifesaving vaccines during the pandemic was criticized by critics as an example of a broader pressure campaign by the federal government to counteract views it doesn't like.
The question now is what boundaries the Supreme Court will set.
Experts say placing too many restrictions on how governments collaborate with private social media companies in areas such as public health, election integrity and foreign interference could undermine efforts to stop harmful misinformation. Experts say this could be hindered.
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But without sufficient guardrails, governments, whether Democratic or Republican, may have too much power to influence public discourse dominated by social media.
“We need to find ways to draw these lines more carefully to protect legitimate speech from government oppression,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies misperceptions about politics and medicine. I think there is,” he said. “But I'm concerned that people are using that idea to try to cut off any kind of government information exchange with social media platforms. I think that could be harmful.”
Can the Supreme Court “break the internet”?
The Supreme Court took up the issue Monday, three weeks after hearing challenges to laws passed in Florida and Texas that limit social media giants' ability to regulate user content.
“This is the second major case in the last month where the Supreme Court could destroy the Internet if we're not careful,” said James Grimmelman, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. “It's unlikely that they would do that. But it's still a case of having to be very precise about what they say.”
Both lawsuits stem from concerns that conservative voices are being suppressed on claims of 2020 election fraud, the origins and treatment of COVID-19, and other issues, with congressional Republicans repeatedly calling the shots. The public hearings have amplified that dissatisfaction.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill last year that would ban federal officials from “advocating censorship of views.” The bill, which has not passed in the Democratic-controlled Senate, was a response to Twitter temporarily blocking links to a New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020. .
Former Twitter executives denied last year that they were pressured by Democrats or police to cover up the story. Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, said he was in regular contact with the FBI on election security issues, and that the agency was always “a line that could be used to insist that Twitter take certain actions.” He testified at a Congressional hearing that he was careful not to exceed the limit.
Lower courts sided with the challengers
A lawsuit in the Supreme Court on Monday pits Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and numerous other federal officials against Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana and five social media users who say their posts and accounts were removed or downgraded. being sued.
Kennedy, who is running for president as an independent, argues in his filing that “there may not be an individual in this country who has been more heavily targeted by federal social media censorship.” However, another case is still progressing in court. .
One of the challengers represented Monday, Jill Hines, co-director of the conservative group Health Freedom Louisiana, said she shared a screenshot of Kennedy's tweet in response to a warning she received from Facebook. It said it contained a warning against posting the Daily Mail article. The headline: “Face masks may increase risk of stillbirth, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline due to carbon dioxide buildup, study warns.''
PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking website, said the studies referenced contained no evidence that masks cause serious health problems.
A district court in Louisiana sided with Hines and other challengers, imposing sweeping restrictions on the government's interactions with social media platforms.
The New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rolled back the restrictions, but the Department of Justice has ruled that government officials cannot make statements about matters of public interest, address national security threats or disclose public health information. He said there will still be unprecedented restrictions on how people can communicate.
The restrictions are on hold while the Supreme Court considers the case.
Three judges have already criticized “government censorship”
Three of the court's six conservative justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, wanted to dismiss the federal government's appeal.
“Censorship of private speech by the government is contrary to our country's democratic form of government, so today's decision is deeply concerning,” Alito said when the court agreed to accept the lawsuit. wrote.
The Justice Department maintains that the public official's interactions with social media platforms were not coercive and did not include “significant encouragement.” Government agencies “primarily provided information to the platforms and left it to them to decide what action to take, if necessary,” government lawyers said in a filing.
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Lawyers for some of the challengers argue that the First Amendment allows the government to mediate “between true and false speech” unless what is being shared is illegal, such as child pornography. It says no.
“Being the truth police is not, and has never been, the government's role,” said Mark Chenoweth, president and chief legal officer of the New Civil Liberties Union. The group represents infectious disease experts who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on low-risk groups to promote “herd immunity.”
Persuasion or coercion?
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University says the Supreme Court needs to clarify the line between permissible persuasion and impermissible coercion, and applying that standard includes a thorough consideration of the facts and context. He said it was necessary to emphasize the need.
For example, in Monday's incident, President Joe Biden's public statement that social media companies are “killing people” by not doing enough to combat misinformation about vaccines may have added public pressure, but , the paper said that even though the choice of words was provocative, it did not constitute a threat of retaliation. The institute investigated some of the charges.
The challengers' rebuttal to an internal email sent by Biden's coronavirus adviser to Facebook officials is more troubling. “It's been several weeks since 100% of the questions I asked were never answered,” the official wrote, complaining that “we have been evaluating options internally as to what to do.”
The institute said the email was accusatory and demanding and could be interpreted as an implicit threat of retribution by regulators.
But the Supreme Court's decisions in this case and in pending decisions on social media laws in Texas and Florida could have far-reaching implications.
Olivier Sylvain, a communications law expert at Fordham University and a fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, calls this “probably the single most important factor in defining how far the government can protect against the online distribution of information.” “This is a once-in-a-generation special opportunity.” Legal and illegal harmful content. ”
Contributors: USA TODAY's Bart Jansen, Jessica Guynn and John Kennedy.
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