It’s been just two days since U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty ruled that the Biden administration may no longer work with social media companies to censor content it dislikes, and already the decision is having an effect on how the White House conducts business.
According to The Washington Post, on Wednesday, the State Department canceled what was a regular monthly meeting with Facebook officials.
The subject of this month’s meeting, according to a Facebook staffer, was to be a discussion of 2024 election preparations and potential hacking threats.
All future meetings, the State Department reportedly told Facebook, have been “canceled pending further guidance.”
Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger called the anti-censorship ruling “a huge victory,” but said that “Congress must go further.”
“It must defund and dismantle the censorship industry,” Shellenberger tweeted on Wednesday. “It must demand Big Tech transparency.”
And, he added, Congress must fire the “criminal and unconstitutional” Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly.
As BizPac Review reported, Judge Doughty wrote in the ruling that “the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Doughty.
Shellenberger, who contributed to the now notorious “Twitter Files,” spoke with Missouri’s former attorney general, now U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, who initiated the lawsuit.
“The Twitter Files were critical because they were a behind-the-scenes view,” Schmitt said. “It’s shocking. The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding. There were direct text messages from the surgeon general of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It’s just un-American.”
“Jennifer Easterly ought to resign, no doubt about that,” Schmitt said. “And I think that the people getting swept up in this now, who were engaged in it, they ought to be exposed, and there ought to be consequences.”
Shellenberger’s call for Congress to act caught the eyes of several high-profile Twitter users.
“I wonder what goes on at the ‘regular Wednesday meeting,’” replied Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk.
“If history is any guide, a lot of bullying,” Shellenberger stated, pointing to several shocking documented instances of exactly that.
Unironically, The Washington Post is reporting that Judge Doughty’s injunction “is affecting government efforts to protect elections” and will hamper the “sharing of information on foreign influence operations.”
When tech companies and State Department officials meet, according to an anonymous WaPo source, “they talk about foreign influence, they compare notes. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions about foreign influence they are seeing.”
“The Biden administration is likely to appeal the injunction before voters head to the polls next year,” according to The Post. “But in the interim, the order is poised to have a chilling effect on the companies’ efforts to guard against misinformation as they work to sort out what types of partnerships are allowed.”
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