The “clear message is to have this sort of chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”
After a federal judge issued a ruling ordering the federal government to stop “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
The lefty censorship lobby responded with pages of unhinged hysteria that failed to address the issue.
Conservatives were repeatedly accused of trafficking in false conspiracy theories to achieve this outcome. But if so, then why worry about the verdict? If the Biden administration isn’t actively urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing social media firms in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech, what could the problem possibly be?
Secondly, lefties and their media claimed that barring the government from advocating censorship was interfering in its free speech.
Here’s the government-funded NPR complaining that, “the government’s ability to fight disinformation online has suffered a legal setback that experts say will have a chilling effect on communications between federal agencies and social media companies.”
A chilling effect generally applies to government suppression of speech, not the suppression of government censorship.
“It’s hard to think of a more sweeping ruling,” says Evelyn Douek, an expert on the regulation of online speech and a professor at Stanford Law School.
“The injunction enjoins tens of thousands, maybe hundred [of] thousands of federal government employees from having almost any kind of communication with private platforms about content on their services,” Douek tells NPR. She notes that while there are exceptions for certain types of criminal content, overall, the “clear message is to have this sort of chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”
Actually, it’s pretty clear about what government employees can and can’t do. They can do most things like send a pineapple to Facebook by courier or ask it to remove pro-ISIS propaganda, what they can’t do is “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Pretty clear.
The term ‘Orwellian’ gets thrown around far too much but here the Left has decided to argue that preventing government employees from censoring people has a chilling effect on their speech. One wonders what the old ACLU or any 1960s liberal would have made of that argument.
Big Tech used a variation of this argument to Florida bans on internet censorship, but the government doesn’t even have a platform. It and its allies are fighting for the right to go censoring.
BTeboe says
Simple – govt does not get to be the decider of what I say, think, or believe. Thinking that they can is where the problem starts.
libertyORdeath says
Im totally with you, but we must keep in mind that American free speech is an anomaly both in past and current history. Censorship and government control are actually the norm, which is why the leftist/globalist cabal is so determined to replace us with more compliant foreigners who have never enjoyed the right to free speech that we as Americans take for granted.
Even so-called liberal democracies in Europe lack the absolute right to free speech and expression that we enjoy here. Just look at the censorship and “hate speech” laws in places like Germany or the UK that posits speech as a privilege that can be taken away from any citizen at any time for any reason they see fit.
We need to go back to America as the beacon of hope to ALL nations that wish to be truly free, as we once were.
The ideology of the left and their globalist allies is paper thin and easily refuted by open debate. Without the freedom to advance the debate, we will be doomed to a Chinese style future of total control abetted by total surveillance. The time in now. Fight or die.
abu taleb says
The left learns very well from muslims. Any defence against Islamic attack is an act of hostility against Islam, therefore muslims have the right to attack.
Walter Sieruk says
A new appropriate title for that horrible pseudo US “president” would now be “Joe Biden the tyrannical and dangerous.”
Furthermore, if Joe Biden be best compared to Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Lenin. or ,Mao Zedong whichever villain best describes him, Biden is vicious and menacing .
Likewise, it should be remembered that before Joe Biden had entered the White House masquerading as a real genuine US President he had said that any “President who gets things done by executive orders and not popular consensus is a dictator.”
Now that Biden is sitting in the Presidential Office he has issued more executive orders than and US President in The history of the United States, even more than Obama.
Therefore by his own words, dictator and tyrant Joe Biden, truly, is.
Walter Sieruk says
George Washington had, very wisely, declared, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.”
Emilie Green says
“One wonders what the old ACLU or any 1960s liberal would have made of that argument.”
We don’t have to spend much time doing that kind of wondering. The plaintiffs in this case are basing their case on the Constitution and the set of USSC rulings that came out in the period from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.
Wellington says
Has anyone come across a single Democratic politician who publicly supports this judge’s ruling? Same with the mutilation of children in the name of “gender affirming care.” Has any Democratic politician denounced this as well?
The Democratic Party has become an enemy of the Constitution and of basic reality. No wonder Mark Levin’s latest work, just out, is entitled “The Democratic Party Hates America.”
tgusa says
The background carries nefarious connotations. However, the clenched fist biden offsets the terrible optics stagecraft. He is crazy, crooked, not very bright, probably always has been. He was in the Senate so nobody ever noticed. As with many Senators, he just dont scare me, nor do the rest of his party. Big talking loudmouths, they are. Actual ideas that might have a 50/50 (bottom of the barrel) chance of succeeding in the real world? No comment from them. Angry bitter jealous envious hateful is no way to go through life. Throw in a healthy helping of self importance, smug superiority (even among each other, and undeserved). Add all those together, what do you come up with?
David M says
As if the government will listen to any judge. The intelligence agencies directly monitor everyone up to Senators, they just don’t give a damn. Why should they, the Senators who have control over them do nothing, they are too busy on the gravy train.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/cia-admits-spying-senate-staffers
Hoi Polloi says
Hate Speech =
The islamo-fascist left’s hatred of speech that exposes them.
Walter Sieruk says
Related to this article is that just today 7/8 /23, I remembered that yesterday was that 18 anniversary of those murderous jihad train bombings in that London train station that killed 52 people and injured many more on July 7 ,2005.
So put on a tee- shirt that had the words Printed on It “Islam is a religion of pieces “ I then when to the public library in my hometown waring that shirt , then sat down to keyboard on the computer.
Then to of the librarians, together approached me and told me that my shirt in “inappropriate” that then they told men change or cover my shirt or leave the library.
In response to their demand, I informed my shirt in only a mirror reflection of that deadly Islamic jihadist train bombing which occur on 7/7/05.
The libertarians refused to listen to reason and the logic of that truth and repeated their demand. It’s amazingly terrible how much influence the politically ideology has infected American society , especially when come to “Muslim sensitivities” about revealing an ugly reflection about the reality of their religion.
This shows that “freedom of speech” is diminishing in America
Walter Sieruk says
Only a few years ago I discovered that in the Pennsylvania , in its capital city, Harrisburg. In the hospital of that city the security guards are instructed to tell any visitor who is wearing a shirt or hat with anything printed on it about remembering September 11, 2001 to leave the hospital because Muslim work and also visit at that place.
The Muslim influence is clear and obvious less and less freedom of speech is allowed.
By the way, soon after 9/11 the many apologists in America had made the claim that “The terrorists and mass murderers of September 11, weren’t real Muslims but criminals who hijacked the peaceful religion of Islam for politics.” How strange !
Nevertheless, the point being that if and that is “If” that claim is true then Muslim shouldn’t have any objections ,at all to some people wearing “remember September 11, 2001 shirts or hats since no Muslims committed those murderous affronts on that day of 9/11/01