Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

>However, various emails show Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits through evidence that the motivation of the NIAID Defendants was a “take down” of protected free speech. Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that.

In reality, the email[0] actually said this:

>There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online yet - is it underway?

Notice how he removed the word "published" from his quote, making it seem like an instruction to a social media company rather than a published rebuttal. He also mischaracterizes a WH aide's email to FB, claiming that the aid accused FB "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", when in actuality he was referring to a WSJ article that detailed actual calls to violence on the platform[1].

He also characterizes Twitter's removal of an account with the handle "AnthonyFauci_" as government-directed censorship of parody:

> NIAID and NIH staff sent several messages to social-media platforms asking them to remove content lampooning or criticizing Dr. Fauci . . . An HHS official then asked Twitter if it could “block” similar parody accounts...

But in reality, the contact was initiated by Twitter, who asked the CDC whether the account was real or fake[2]. Why were they confused about this? Because the account wasn't a parody at all; its name was "Dr. Anthony Fauci", its bio was "Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases #NIAID", and there was nothing parodic about its tweets[3][4], which purported to be giving out factual info; it was a straight up impersonation.

On the subject of Dr. Fauci, there's a particularly egregious section where the judge accuses him and other members of NIAID of 'censoring' the so-called Great Barrington Declaration. To support his claim that Reddit and Google censored the GBD at the government's behest, he cites an article[5] that describes how Reddit mods (not Reddit the company!) took down links to the GBD, and complains about the top Google search results for the GBD were all disparaging it, without providing any evidence that either NIAID instructed Google to change the results, or even any evidence that Google purposely changed the results at all. His accusation is that Fauci made public statements 'in collusion' with another employee

>Dr. Fauci testified “it’s possible that” he coordinated with Dr. Collins on his public statements attacking the GBD.

Disparaging the GBD, and that Google and these individual mods in turn took independent action against it. So I guess PSAs are censorship?

Needless to say, there's a lot of issues with this injunction, and from just the small sections I've looked at, it doesn't seem like the judge has applied the necessary rigor to justify a nationwide injunction restricting the government from nearly all contact with various companies and nonprofits. I kind of wish Ars Technics had done some of this scrutiny (which really didn't take that long) before publishing this article.

[0]https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/12/18/23/51969841-10324873...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=36619117

[2]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...

[3]https://twitter.com/merrymanlab/status/1239321484297998336

[4]http://web.archive.org/web/20200313170022/https://twitter.co...

[5]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...

That's called the internet.

Corporations having the right to censor is no better than the government.

Yes it is, there are lots of corporations and anyone can start one. There is only one government that applies to someone at any one time and they have a monopoly on violence.

In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.

It's clear cut that the internet does that already and corporations do not have to broadcast what they don't want to.

If you hate censorship so much why are you on hacker news? This is one of the most censored sites on the internet. Comments are not just deleted and removed but there is no record when they are.

There are plenty of sites that let anyone post whatever they want and they turn into people spamming nazi propaganda. You can find these sites and see if you like them better than the mainstream sites of the internet.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.