The MRC's Murthy Muddle, Part 2
When the Supreme Court rejected a right-wing effort to block correction of online lies and misinformation, the Media Research Center threw a fit, attacking the ruling as "un-American."
While it was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the Murthy v. Missouri case, the Media Research Center — which has made the case its key to banning any correction of lies and misinformation online, which tells you how invested the MRC is in peddling and protecting false right-wing narratives — tried to do a little ref-working. Catherine Salgado found a right-wing professor to repeat her preferred talking points in an April 1 post:
One legal expert is telling Americans that abridgment, not coercion, is the standard in a landmark free speech rights case.
Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University legal scholar and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, took on what he argued is an incorrect standard for a landmark case. As the free speech case, Murthy v. Missouri, is before the U.S. Supreme Court, George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin argued for Reason Magazine that government “coercion” is the standard in determining constitutional violations. Hamburger, however, who represents most of the case’s individual plaintiffs, explained in a piece in Reason that the standard is abridgment, and the government does not have the power to violate Americans’ free speech, even if provable coercion is not involved.
The “First Amendment bars government from ‘abridging’ the freedom of speech, and thus bars reducing that freedom,” Hamburger explained. He also noted that the amendment bars the federal government from “prohibiting” the free exercise of religion. Thus, abridgment and prohibition are distinct and separate standards.
Indeed, Hamburger argued, “freedom of speech is violated by a mere reducing of that freedom, whether or not through coercion.” Some verbs in the Constitution are “generic,” but the First Amendment language is not, he wrote. Hamburger also cited past scholarship on abridgment language about freedom of speech. The specificity seems deliberate and important. Therefore, if the government and Big Tech did collude to reduce free speech, that is a constitutional violation, even without specific coercion, according to Hamburger.
Salgado then showed how absolutist her side is on this issue: “Hamburger further stated that any government ‘policy of any sort to suppress lawful speech — whether because it is false or offensive — is forbidden’ by the First Amendment.” No explanation is provided as to why nobody is allowed to correct false or misleading information and liars are allowed to spread those lies with impunity.
Salgado ranted at a Democratic senator who critiqued the case in a May 9 post:
Two major government agencies have reportedly rebooted their collusion with social media companies despite looming Supreme Court scrutiny for potential First Amendment violations.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) broke the news during a press briefing at the tech-tied RSA Conference, according to tech outlet Nextgov/FCW. At the event, the senator reportedly conceded that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are back to their old work of coordinating censorship of free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
[…]
The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, a major free speech case that exposed an alleged massive network of government and Big Tech censorship collusion. Legal challenges reportedly limited government activity, but that is no longer the case, according to Warner and Nextgov/FCW.
“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” Warner said, according to the tech outlet. The Democrat [sic] senator then urged the Biden administration to “call out” other nations for potential election meddling, asserting Russian interference in the 2016 election as a precedent. Yet Warner did not apparently address the issue of social media interfering in U.S. elections through censorship under U.S. government pressure.
Again, Salgado did not explain why making sure voters have accurate information is “censorship,” or why liars should be exempt from “government pressure” for spreading those lies. Instead, she promoted her employer’s activism on the issue:
According to a poll conducted by the Media Research Center in November 2020, 17 percent of individuals who voted for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden admitted that they would not have done so if they had been aware of the scandals involving both Biden and his son, Hunter. These scandals were censored by Big Tech and the legacy media.
Murthy v. Missouri is a historic case challenging alleged government collusion with major tech companies to censor Americans’ free speech. The complaint filed for the suit cited MRC Free Speech America’s unique and exclusive CensorTrack.org research.
As ConWebWatch has documented, that 2020 polling was done by two right-wing pollsters, raising legitimate questions about its bias and legitimacy. Salgado doesn’t want to talk about that.
A June 12 post touted an op-ed published in the right-wing Washington Times (whose bias was not disclosed) by the MRC’s Dan Schneider and Tim Kilcullen, in which they purported to explain “the stakes” in Murthy and other related decisions: “Schneider and Kilcullen warn that if the Court makes the wrong choice, it will have inverted the First Amendment, guaranteeing extra-constitutional protections for government and Big Tech censorship while stifling Americans’ free speech rights.” In the op-ed itself, Schneider and Kilcullen simply spout their tired, biased rhetoric:
In one of these cases, Murthy v. Missouri, the Biden administration argues that the government, through its officials, has a First Amendment right to coordinate with, and even coerce, Big Tech platforms to censor their political opponents. In the connected dispute, Big Tech’s trade association — NetChoice — argues that the First Amendment guarantees social media platforms the right to censor their users’ speech, nullifying Florida and Texas anti-discrimination laws.
To assert that censorship — the silencing of others’ speech —- is protected by the First Amendment is entirely ahistorical. The First Amendment was crafted to protect political speech and political advocacy, especially those that criticize governments and powerful interests. The Founding Fathers did not merely intend to protect dinner table conversation or barroom gossip, but to protect speech designed to effectuate political change.
They do not explain why falsehoods and misinformation cannot be corrected and must be allowed to stand no matter what.
A June 12 post by Christian Baldwin quoted COVID quasi-anti-vaxxer Jay Bhattacharya railing about the case:
A prominent doctor and leading critic of COVID lockdowns addressed the major ramifications of Murthy v. Missouri and discussed the ideal outcome for free speech and the American people.
ReasonTV interviewed with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized lockdowns as a means of protecting public health. Bhattacharya discussed the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, emphasizing the importance of preventing government censorship.
The case, which partially relied on research conducted by MRC, demanded legal redress over the Biden Administration’s blatant censorship requests to social media companies. Bhattacharya indicated that he found the case compelling and asserted that the government had no prerogative to censor.
“What I really want is that [sic] the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online,” Bhattacharya expressed. “I think that free speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of scientific discussion, of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made, and the government suppressing that is a really, really bad idea.”
As ConWebWatch has pointed out, the Great Barrington Declaration pushed the dangerous policy of “herd immunity” at a time when COVID was still killing thousands, no vaccine had yet been developed, and it was unclear herd immunity would even work (and it doesn’t, given the need for regular vaccinations). Bhattacharya offered no evidence (that Baldwin noted, anyway) that he was “censored” solely for questioning the need for lockdowns. Baldwin let him rant anyway:
But Bhattacharya argued that in the real world, harmful and benign become a lot harder to discern and cited COVID policies as a case and proof.
“Well, I mean, what actually happened during the pandemic was that the government suppressed speech that would have criticized government policy that in effect told kids metaphorically to jump out of windows, right? They closed schools, harming kids at scale. They recommended that kids, even kids as young as six months old, take a vaccine that they probably didn’t need.”
Bhattacharya offered no evidence that very young children “didn’t need” the vaccine, even though more than 17,000 children have died of COVID.
Luis Cornelio took another shot at Warner in a June 19 post:
The Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairman has sounded the alarm about the so-called threats looming over the 2024 presidential election: artificial intelligence and disinformation.
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) claimed that these threats—which he suggested were imminent—would transform the election into “Wild, Wild West.”
Warner made these comments during an event with The Christian Science Monitor, where he addressed Murthy v. Missouri, a pending Supreme Court case set to determine if the federal government violated the First Amendment by coercing Big Tech platforms to censor Americans.
Warner’s alarm comes after his failed attempts to stoke fears about foreign interference in the 2024 election. “We may be less prepared 155 days out in 2024 than we were under President Trump (in 2020),” he told the Associated Press earlier this month.
Cornelio offered no proof to counter Warner’s claims about foreign election interference.
Still waiting on SCOTUS
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 MRC 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 why it should be forbidden to anyone to correct it.
Pariseau and 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.”
SCOTUS rejects, MRC complains
In a blow to this right-wing narrative, the court ultimately rejected the case. Cue the partisan complaints from the MRC, starting with a June 26 post by Vazquez that quoted only a dissent from the ruling and forgot to mention the name of the case:
It’s a bad day for free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the government may continue to pressure Big Tech companies to censor speech it disapproves of, and dissenting Justice Samuel Alito tore the outrageous decision apart.
The Court ruled 6-3 — with Justice Amy Coney Barrett authoring the Opinion — that the complainants lacked standing to file an “injunction against any defendant” because they failed to demonstrate “particularized” harm. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined in the majority’s ridiculous position.
The Court’s explicit gaslighting as to the Big Tech companies’ independent reasons for censoring content was particularly galling. “And while the record reflects the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,” Barrett wrote on behalf of the majority. The absurd implication here is that yes, the government was strong-arming the platforms, but it was ultimately the tech companies’ decision.
Alito went straight to the point in his dissent, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas: “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”
Alito, writing for the minority, further rebuked that what the government did in colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans “was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
In shirking its duty to properly tackle the un-American onslaught against free speech brought before the Court, Alito said the majority “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”
Vazquez didn’t explain how, exactly, it’s “un-American” to correct lies, or how it’s supposedly completely “American” to let those lies stand.
A June 26 post by Catherine Salgado continued the partisan wailing:
Free speech advocates are ripping the U.S. Supreme Court‘s refusal to protect the First Amendment from government-tech censorship collusion.
State and individual plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri provided evidence of severe government pressure on Big Tech companies to censor specific users. The majority of the Court ruled, however, on Wednesday that the plaintiffs did not have “standing.” Numerous pro-free speech advocates called out the outrageous, tone deaf decision issued by the majority, including Mark Levin, Jonathan Turley, and one of the case’s plaintiffs, Dr. Bhattacharya.
As MRC President Brent Bozell soberly commented on X (formerly Twitter) about the decision, “Censorship from our government continues unchecked. A devastating loss for free speech.”
In the same vein, MRC VP for Free Speech Dan Schneider posted in a hard-hitting X thread, “We have just witnessed a dagger in the heart of the First Amendment’s right to free speech. The guarantee of our right to criticize government is lost.”
Schneider continued, “The First Amendment is supposed to guarantee our rights to speak against government power and against the people who wield that power.” But the majority decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Schneider stated, allows government censorship of individuals “unless LATER proven to have violated … something. She never gets around to explaining what this something is, giving Joe Biden carte blanche license to strong arm Big Tech (and other powerful allies) to erase dissenting views.”
Agreeing with Schneider, MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris castigated the ruling as a “fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment.”
Funny how the MRC’s right-wing partisans presume to know the Constitution better than a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. Salgado went on to quote other right-wing activists bashing the ruling — even as she refused to quote from the ruling itself — but nobody who supported it. Isn’t that the kind of media bias the MRC is supposedly against?
Needless to say, there was lots of dishonest whining about “censorship” and no explanation of why lies and misinformation cannot be corrected, or why malicious lies must be treated as “free speech.”
Luis Cornelio whined about the ruling in a June 27 post cheering the Republican House advancing a bill that would “effectively shut down the Department of State’s censorship initiatives”:
The funding bill comes after free speech advocates scolded the U.S. Supreme Court following its outrageous decision in Murthy v. Missouri, a crucial case that sought to block the Biden administration from unleashing its attack dogs to coerce social media platforms to censor Americans ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
In a 6-3 decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on behalf of the majority that the pro-free speech plaintiffs lacked standing to proceed with the case against the Biden administration.
Echoing Bozell’s sentiments, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider said, “Because the Supreme Court came down with a disastrous opinion, essentially greenlighting Biden’s censorship efforts, it is more important now than ever that Congress defund these unlawful practices.”
He added, “All credit to chairmen Cole and Diaz-Balart for fighting for our First Amendment rights.”
Again, no explanation was given for why correcting what the bill calls “mis-, dis- and mal-information” must be forbidden. Meanwhile, Christian Baldwin wailed further in a June 28 post otherwise dedicated to gushing over former Elon Musk stenographer Matt Taibbi chatting with Tucker Carlson: “This Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Murthy v Missouri that the federal government could continue to collude with social media companies to censor online content. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito described the Court’s decision as setting a precedent allowing the federal government to circumvent the First Amendment.”
None of these articles, by the way, quoted directly from the majority ruling, save for a single line in Vazquez’s piece. That suggests that the MRC wants to hide anything that might discredit their dishonest “censorship” narrative.