CASE
SUMMARY
Public statements, emails, and publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration have violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflicted with the government’s messaging on Covid-19.
NCLA joined the lawsuit, State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al., representing renowned epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 issues. This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to social media companies.
This sort of censorship, which strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech—has constituted unlawful government action. Moreover, this state action has deprived Americans of their right to hear the views of those who are being silenced, a First Amendment corollary of the right to free speech.