The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Murthy v. Missouri case — a right-wing effort to block correction of false and misleading claims online by dishonestly claiming that doing so constitutes “censorship” — was still pending in late June, so the Media Research Center continued to work to keep that dishonest narrative alive. Gabriela Pariseau huffed in a June 20 post:
President Joe Biden sits atop a censorship regime made up of federal agencies that has repeatedly pressured Big Tech social media companies to clamp down on those who express views in opposition to his own.
The U.S. Supreme Court is about to hand down its opinion in Murthy v. Missouri, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to prevent the Biden administration from colluding with and coercing Big Tech companies to censor Americans. A lower court found that, along with top White House staffers like former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, high ranking members of our federal agencies used their power to pressure Big Tech firms into censoring Biden’s political opponents. In their briefs, and during oral argument, the Biden administration and the attorneys for Big Tech shockingly argued that the federal government has a First Amendment right to pressure Big Tech platforms to censor the speech of individuals. The purpose of the First Amendment, of course, is the opposite: To establish–without doubt–the inalienable right of individuals to speak against their government.
Below in detail are the seven Biden administration-led federal agencies that have actively worked with Big Tech companies, including payment processors, to silence Americans’ speech online.
None of the examples Pariseau offered appeared to involve actual “censorship” of those who were merely “speak[ing] against their government” — most appeared to involve trying to correct false and misleading claims about election fraud and COVID-19 vaccines, or to block foreign interference in elections. And as usual, she did not explain why lies and misinformation should never be challenged.
Joseph Vazquez similarly cheered that right-wing election disinformation will be flooding online outlets in a June 21 post under the snotty headline “CRY MORE”:
NBC News is having a nervous breakdown over the Biden administration not doing enough to fight so-called “domestic disinformation” before the 2024 election.
“The Biden admin has no firm plan to call out domestic disinformation in the 2024 election,” NBC News whined in its June 19 headline. The outlet whined that the reason for this hesitation is due to Americans being fed up after dealing with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security being exposed for extensively coordinating censorship strategies with Big Tech companies at least since the 2020 election cycle.
“Although cyber experts in and outside of government expect an onslaught of disinformation and deepfakes during this year’s election campaign, officials in the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain worried that if they weigh in, they will face accusations that they are attempting to tilt the election in favor of President Joe Biden’s re-election,” NBC News wrote. How terrible that Biden’s Ministry of Truth got the heebie-jeebies about being potentially called out for interfering in another election, right NBC?
[…]Louisiana Chief District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty in a 2023 ruling in the ongoing Murthy v. Missouri litigation — when it was still known as Missouri v. Biden — that “‘Domestic disinformation’ was also flagged by the FBI for social-media platforms.
Like Pariseau, Vazquez wouldn’t explain his love of election disinformation and it should be forbidden to anyone to correct it.
Pariseau and Christian Baldwin found two more federal agencies to attack in a June 25 post:
President Joe Biden entered office with the attitude of not letting the powerful COVID-19 crisis go to waste. The pandemic was the perfect cover to unfold his coordinated censorship regime.
MRC Free Speech America recently detailed the seven censors of Biden’s federal government. Sitting atop that censorship regime, however, is the Biden White House, which attempted to push nearly every major Big Tech company to censor Americans in the name of “safety” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden, his Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Census Bureau worked alongside Meta and Google, and in the case of the White House, Twitter and Amazon as well, to push their desired narrative about the COVID-19 vaccines.
In its recent report, MRC outlined seven federal entities that have worked to censor American citizens’ free speech. These include: the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, The National Science Foundation and Department of the Treasury. But there are two others that bear mentioning: The White House itself and the Department of Commerce.
Well, yes, wanting Americans to live in a healthy manner during the pandemic could be described as a “desired narrative,” which Pariseau and Baldwin do nothing to demonstrate is somehow evil. They went on to complain that the White House “asked why Twitter had not censored COVID-19 vaccine critic Alex Berenson” — while not explaining that Berenson had notoriously spread misinformation and lies about the pandemic, to the point that the Atlantic called him “the pandemic’s wrongest man.” Again, our writers fail to explain why it should be prohibited to point out Berenson’s lies since they had the potential for killing people, or explain how correcting lies and misinformation is actually a nefarious “censorship regime.”
Still, they managed to tout their employer’s activism by hyping that “MRC Free Speech America research utilizing our exclusive CensorTrack database was cited in the complaint for the Murthy v. Missouri case.”