Court Orders Fauci, Biden Officials To Testify For Colluding With Big Tech Against Covid Critics
A federal judge issued a ruling that requires senior Biden officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci to comply with an investigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general into the government’s efforts to collude with social media over Covid-related posts.
Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry state that Fauci, as the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, is “directly involved with multiple social media censorship campaigns against COVID-19 misinformation.”
“Plaintiffs further this argument by pointing out the publicly available emails between Drs. Fauci and Collins regarding their efforts to discredit the lab-leak theory, which Plaintiffs assert led to the censorship of the theory online,” states the court order.
"These emails indicate that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins were both aware of certain scientists’ concerns that SARS-CoV-2 looked bioengineered. However, those same scientists authored a paper for Nature Medicine that discredited the lab-leak theory despite that three days earlier on February 1, they had advocated the theory to Dr. Fauci.”
Schmitt and Landry allege that Fauci was involved in the decision to remove former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson from Twitter. In July, internal communications revealed Biden’s aides held meetings with Twitter staffers during which aides requested the removal of Berenson’s account. Twitter permanently banned Berenson – before reinstating him following a lawsuit – shortly after the White House’s request.
AGs believe Fauci was behind the push to silence Berenson.
Leaked documents also show the Biden admin pressured Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to silence Covid critics. In September, state attorneys general obtained emails that reveal the White House arranged weekly calls with Meta execs to discuss content to censor.
Specifically, the documents unearthed a conversation in which a Biden official asked Instagram to remove a parody account that mocked Dr. Fauci’s Covid recommendations. IG banned the satirical account permanently after its conversation with the White House.
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Furthermore, the court granted the plaintiffs’ request to depose former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. The AGs allege Psaki's public statements “reinforced the public threats of adverse legal consequences to social-media platforms if they do not increase censorship of views disfavored by federal officials.”
Last summer, Jen Psaki bragged that the White House had identified “problematic” posts for Facebook to censor because they contained what the Biden admin considered “misinformation” about COVID-19. Following the trend, Facebook removed over 20 million pieces of COVID “misinformation.”
Each of these revelations shows Big Tech platforms acting as an agent to the government. The White House is directly contacting social media services and pressuring them to censor critics of its rule.
We covered the significance of this development in a column from July:
"Advocates for social media censorship have accurately argued that free speech rights do not apply to private companies, such as Twitter. Yet we have a presidential administration using its power to turn private platforms into “state actors,” whom citizens can sue for restricting First Amendment rights.
"These internal communications show a government using a third party to subvert the foundation of the First Amendment. The U.S. government does not have the legal ability to censor the public on its own. So, here is an administration trying to seize unconstitutional power by strong-arming a communication platform beholden to a protection called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.”