While it was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the Murthy v. Missouri case, the Media Research Center — which has made the case its key to banning any correction of lies and misinformation online, which tells you how invested the MRC is in peddling and protecting false right-wing narratives — tried to do a little ref-working. Catherine Salgado found a right-wing professor to repeat her preferred talking points in an April 1 post:
One legal expert is telling Americans that abridgment, not coercion, is the standard in a landmark free speech rights case.
Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University legal scholar and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, took on what he argued is an incorrect standard for a landmark case. As the free speech case, Murthy v. Missouri, is before the U.S. Supreme Court, George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin argued for Reason Magazine that government “coercion” is the standard in determining constitutional violations. Hamburger, however, who represents most of the case’s individual plaintiffs, explained in a piece in Reason that the standard is abridgment, and the government does not have the power to violate Americans’ free speech, even if provable coercion is not involved.
The “First Amendment bars government from ‘abridging’ the freedom of speech, and thus bars reducing that freedom,” Hamburger explained. He also noted that the amendment bars the federal government from “prohibiting” the free exercise of religion. Thus, abridgment and prohibition are distinct and separate standards.
Indeed, Hamburger argued, “freedom of speech is violated by a mere reducing of that freedom, whether or not through coercion.” Some verbs in the Constitution are “generic,” but the First Amendment language is not, he wrote. Hamburger also cited past scholarship on abridgment language about freedom of speech. The specificity seems deliberate and important. Therefore, if the government and Big Tech did collude to reduce free speech, that is a constitutional violation, even without specific coercion, according to Hamburger.
Salgado then showed how absolutist her side is on this issue: “Hamburger further stated that any government ‘policy of any sort to suppress lawful speech — whether because it is false or offensive — is forbidden’ by the First Amendment.” No explanation is provided as to why nobody is allowed to correct false or misleading information and liars are allowed to spread those lies with impunity.
Salgado ranted at a Democratic senator who critiqued the case in a May 9 post:
Two major government agencies have reportedly rebooted their collusion with social media companies despite looming Supreme Court scrutiny for potential First Amendment violations.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) broke the news during a press briefing at the tech-tied RSA Conference, according to tech outlet Nextgov/FCW. At the event, the senator reportedly conceded that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are back to their old work of coordinating censorship of free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
[…]The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, a major free speech case that exposed an alleged massive network of government and Big Tech censorship collusion. Legal challenges reportedly limited government activity, but that is no longer the case, according to Warner and Nextgov/FCW.
“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” Warner said, according to the tech outlet. The Democrat [sic] senator then urged the Biden administration to “call out” other nations for potential election meddling, asserting Russian interference in the 2016 election as a precedent. Yet Warner did not apparently address the issue of social media interfering in U.S. elections through censorship under U.S. government pressure.
Again, Salgado did not explain why making sure voters have accurate information is “censorship,” or why liars should be exempt from “government pressure” for spreading those lies. Instead, she promoted her employer’s activism on the issue:
According to a poll conducted by the Media Research Center in November 2020, 17 percent of individuals who voted for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden admitted that they would not have done so if they had been aware of the scandals involving both Biden and his son, Hunter. These scandals were censored by Big Tech and the legacy media.
Murthy v. Missouri is a historic case challenging alleged government collusion with major tech companies to censor Americans’ free speech. The complaint filed for the suit cited MRC Free Speech America’s unique and exclusive CensorTrack.org research.
As we’ve documented, that 2020 polling was done by two right-wing pollsters, raising legitimate questions about its bias and legitimacy. Salgado doesn’t want to talk about that.
A June 12 post touted an op-ed published in the right-wing Washington Times (whose bias was not disclosed) by the MRC’s Dan Schneider and Tim Kilcullen, in which they purported explain “the stakes” in Murthy and other related decisions: “Schneider and Kilcullen warn that if the Court makes the wrong choice, it will have inverted the First Amendment, guaranteeing extra-constitutional protections for government and Big Tech censorship while stifling Americans’ free speech rights.” In the op-ed itself, Schneider and Kilcullen simply spout their tired, biased rhetoric:
In one of these cases, Murthy v. Missouri, the Biden administration argues that the government, through its officials, has a First Amendment right to coordinate with, and even coerce, Big Tech platforms to censor their political opponents. In the connected dispute, Big Tech’s trade association — NetChoice — argues that the First Amendment guarantees social media platforms the right to censor their users’ speech, nullifying Florida and Texas anti-discrimination laws.
To assert that censorship — the silencing of others’ speech —- is protected by the First Amendment is entirely ahistorical. The First Amendment was crafted to protect political speech and political advocacy, especially those that criticize governments and powerful interests. The Founding Fathers did not merely intend to protect dinner table conversation or barroom gossip, but to protect speech designed to effectuate political change.
They do not explain why falsehoods and misinformation cannot be corrected and must be allowed to stand no matter what.
A June 12 post by Christian Baldwin quoted COVID quasi-anti-vaxxer Jay Bhattacharya railing about the case:
A prominent doctor and leading critic of COVID lockdowns addressed the major ramifications of Murthy v. Missouri and discussed the ideal outcome for free speech and the American people.
ReasonTV interviewed with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized lockdowns as a means of protecting public health. Bhattacharya discussed the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, emphasizing the importance of preventing government censorship.
The case, which partially relied on research conducted by MRC, demanded legal redress over the Biden Administration’s blatant censorship requests to social media companies. Bhattacharya indicated that he found the case compelling and asserted that the government had no prerogative to censor.
“What I really want is that [sic] the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online,” Bhattacharya expressed. “I think that free speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of scientific discussion, of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made, and the government suppressing that is a really, really bad idea.”
As we’ve pointed out, the Great Barrington Declaration pushed the dangerous policy of “herd immunity” at a time when COVID was still killing thousands, no vaccine had yet been developed, and it was unclear herd immunity would even work (and it doesn’t, given the need for regular vaccinations). Bhattacharya offered no evidence (that Baldwin noted, anyway) that he was “censored” solely for questioning the need for lockdowns. Baldwin let him rant anyway:
But Bhattacharya argued that in the real world, harmful and benign become a lot harder to discern and cited COVID policies as a case and proof.
“Well, I mean, what actually happened during the pandemic was that the government suppressed speech that would have criticized government policy that in effect told kids metaphorically to jump out of windows, right? They closed schools, harming kids at scale. They recommended that kids, even kids as young as six months old, take a vaccine that they probably didn’t need.”
Bhattacharya offered no evidence that very young children “didn’t need” the vaccine, even though more than 17,000 children have died of COVID.
Luis Cornelio took another shot at Warner in a June 19 post:
The Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairman has sounded the alarm about the so-called threats looming over the 2024 presidential election: artificial intelligence and disinformation.
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) claimed that these threats—which he suggested were imminent—would transform the election into “Wild, Wild West.”
Warner made these comments during an event with The Christian Science Monitor, where he addressed Murthy v. Missouri, a pending Supreme Court case set to determine if the federal government violated the First Amendment by coercing Big Tech platforms to censor Americans.
Warner’s alarm comes after his failed attempts to stoke fears about foreign interference in the 2024 election. “We may be less prepared 155 days out in 2024 than we were under President Trump (in 2020),” he told the Associated Press earlier this month.
Cornelio offered no proof to counter Warner’s claims about foreign election interference.