“I don’t get involved in any way with social media,” he said. “I do not have an account. I don’t tweet, I don’t use Facebook and I don’t pay attention to it.”
In addition to the states of Missouri and Louisiana, the plaintiffs include two leading epidemiologists who have questioned the government’s handling of the pandemic, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry fired by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing to be vaccinated against covid; Jill Hines, director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization she has been accused of misinformation; and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that claims in its promos that “for 15 years, we’ve been fighting Big Tech and the leftists who want to shut us down.”
Jenin Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization that represents individual plaintiffs, said the government had tried to circumvent free speech rights by forcing private companies to take action on speech that would otherwise , is constitutionally protected.
“You can’t use third parties to do what you can’t do,” he said in an interview at the organization’s Washington office.
There is no question that the Biden administration has used the bullying pulpit on a number of issues, including urging Americans to get vaccinated and asking platforms to restrict accounts that tried to dissuade them.
The legal challenge for the plaintiffs is to show that the government used its legal or regulatory power to punish companies when they failed to comply, which they often did not.
“No this is not doable/we don’t do this,” wrote a Twitter executive, according to one from Twitter files, after Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who led the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, urged the company to remove accounts that post information about committee staffers.
