Uncovering The Army Of Federal Censors

Missouri v. Biden

• The executive branch of the federal government colludes with social media to censor any content that questions, challenges, or contradicts the government’s policies.
• While private companies might choose to censor content on their platforms, the government cannot pressure or coerce private companies to censor disfavored content.

The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise”

• Includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media-all with the intent of pressuring platforms to censor and suppress speech that federal officials disfavor.
• The breadth and extent of the federal Defendants’ censorship activities is massive, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department and the US Election Assistance Commission, and numerous White House officials.

A few examples of how this government censorship regime has been functioning

• After President Biden publicly stated (about Facebook) on July 16, 2021, that "They're killing people," a very senior executive at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) reached out to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to engage in damage control and appease the President's wrath
• Soon thereafter, the same Meta executive sent a text message noting that "it's not great to be accused of killing people" and expressing that he was "keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively."
• This involved increasing censorship on Meta's platforms
• One week after President Biden's public accusation, a senior Meta executive emailed to assure him that Facebook will shortly be expanding its COVID policies to further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content on their platform

The brief goes on to explain how this amounts to more than just collaboration or cooperation between government and Big Tech, but coercive use of power dynamics to pressure Big Tech to do the government’s bidding

• Such communications from the White House impose maximal pressure on social-media companies, and they clearly get results when it comes to censorship.
• In fact, such pressures from government officials have succeeded on a grand scale: Discovery received so far indicates that a veritable army of federal bureaucrats are involved in censorship activities across the federal enterprise

https://brownstone.org/articles/uncovering-the-army-of-federal-censors/