A federal lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration coerced or colluded with social media companies to suppress disfavored opinions is now entering an expedited discovery phase that some observers say will produce “seismic” results.
The attorneys general in both Louisiana and Missouri filed the First Amendment lawsuit in the Western District of Louisiana, accusing government defendants of working to suppress social media discussions of topics such as the theory that COVID-19’s origin centered around a leak at a lab in China and questions about the security of voting by mail.
Federal Judge Terry Doughty on July 12 approved the plaintiffs’ motion for expedited discovery in the case, a move that attorney John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment, called a potential game-changer in documenting suppression of free speech.
“The upshot is that in the near future – a matter of a few months – we may know the details (or many of them, anyway) of how the Biden administration has leaned on, or conspired with, tech companies to censor disfavored information and opinions,” Hinderaker said in a recent blog post about the litigation.
The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about the case, but Hinderaker said the court would have to examine whether government actions cross the legal line in the form of coercion, inducements or collusion.
“At some level, I assume everyone would agree that a government can’t achieve censorship by forcing a private party (a newspaper, say, or a television network) to suppress content that the government itself would not be able to censor,” Hinderaker told the Louisiana Record. “If the Federal Communications Commission went to CBS News and said they’d better not put any Republicans on the air, or the FCC will yank their licenses, I think everyone would agree that the First Amendment has been violated.”
But other government actions might not cross that line in the opinion of the federal court, he said.
“Where on the coercion/inducement/collusion scale the courts ultimately will find state action, the requirement for application of the First Amendment, is anyone’s guess,” Hinderaker said.
Evidence supporting the plaintiffs’ lawsuit includes an affidavit from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, who said his social media posts criticizing the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic were removed after a former National Institutes of Health director urged “a quick and devastating published takedown of the premises” of Bhattacharya’s declaration.