Why it is so crucial that plaintiffs prevail in Missouri vs. Biden
One of the potentially most consequential lawsuits ever is currently being litigated in a Louisiana federal district court. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and a number of private parties have brought suit against President Joseph Biden and a host of federal agencies, seeking an injunction against government collusion with Big Tech social media platforms (SMPs) to abridge Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Plaintiffs’ theory of the case is that government pressure on the SMPs, and the close nexus of interrelationships between government agencies and the SMP platforms, effectively turned those platforms into agents of the government, and thus made them subject to the strictures of the First Amendment against governmental infringement of speech. Effectively, the government was censoring through tech companies what it could not censor directly.
Much of the information upon which the suit is predicated only became known after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and released millions of Twitter internal documents and communications with government agencies to independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and David Zweig. The resulting Twitter files reveal, in Shellenberger’s words, a “censorship industrial complex.” According to Taibbi, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship.”
The major social media companies were deeply intertwined with multiple government security agencies. In the period prior to the 2020 election, for instance, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, met weekly with officials of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Elvis Chan, a special agent in the FBI’s San Francisco office, offered top Twitter officials national security clearance, so they could more efficiently deal with the deluge of FBI requests for action. James Baker, former FBI general counsel and subsequently deputy general counsel at Twitter, boasts in one email of a $3.5 million payment from the FBI to Twitter for time spent processing FBI requests.
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