This is a huge victory for free speech! And strangely very much under-reported. Via NY Sun.
A federal appeals court, the Fifth Circuit at New Orleans, has expanded the scope of an injunction against the Biden administration’s efforts to police online media platforms to include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, or CISA, which the court says likely violated the First Amendment rights of Americans by attempting to suppress online chatter about the 2020 presidential election.
The court’s ruling forbids the agency and its director, Jen Easterly, as well as her lieutenants, from attempting to “coerce or significantly encourage” tech companies to tamp down comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms that it considers problematic. The court says the agency routinely collaborated with the FBI in its efforts to police what it calls “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” about the elections. By “mal-information,” the agency means information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
CISA’s effort to curtail free speech “went beyond mere information sharing,” the court says. “Like the CDC for COVID-related claims, CISA told the platforms whether certain election-related claims were true or false. CISA’s actions apparently led to moderation policies being altered and content being removed or demoted by the recipient platforms.”
The attorney general for Missouri, Andrew Bailey, one of the plaintiffs in the case Missouri v. Biden, described CISA as “the ‘nerve center’ of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story” in a post on Twitter shortly after the decision was handed down.
The decision by the court expands on an injunction already in place that prevents officials from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, and others from forcing tech companies to remove comments or content challenging government directives or consensus opinions on vaccines, the Covid pandemic, election integrity, and other hot-button issues.
“It is true that the officials have an interest in engaging with social media companies, including on issues such as misinformation and election interference,” the Fifth Circuit ruling states. “But the government is not permitted to advance these interests to the extent that it engages in viewpoint suppression.”
Read the entire story and more here.
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1 comment:
To paraphrase Stalin..."How many divisions does the 5th Circuit Court command?". The Commies in power simply don't care about court rulings they don't like. And there is NOBODY to stop them. They WILL continue to abuse their power and ignore our Rights. Count on it.
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