(Ezekiel Loseke, Headline USA) Facebook’s parent company, Meta, was colluding with the government to censor the users of its “private messaging” app, called WhatsApp, according to new documents revealed in a lawsuit against the federal government over censorship.
The landmark case is called Missouri v. Biden, and it centers around an injunction filed by Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, to prevent the federal government from colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans.
In the normal legal proceedings Bailey’s office received “thousands of internal federal documents” that it said offered proof of collusion, according to a press release from Bailey’s office.
“The motion for preliminary injunction highlights 1,432 facts showing that top officials in the federal government are coercing and colluding with big tech social media companies to censor free speech,” said the press release.
Bailey said the amount of evidence and the audacious way in which the government brazenly violated basic constitutional rights made it one of the most significant free-speech cases in modern memory.
“The First Amendment is the cornerstone of our republic because the founders understood that the remedy to false speech has always been counter speech, not government censorship,” he said.
“This case is the most important free speech lawsuit in a generation, as we highlight more than 1,400 facts showing the Biden Administration’s blatant coercion and collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with,” he continued. “I will not rest until the court blocks unelected bureaucrats from violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
Documents found in this process demonstrate not only censorship and collusion, but that the federal government was spying on and interfering with private messages on Facebook’s Whatsapp, according to George Washington Univesity legal scholar Jonathan Turley.
In addition to the WhatsApp censorship, emails obtained in the discovery process showed that Rob Flaherty, the Biden administration’s director of digital strategy, pushed for even more aggressive censorship.
“I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse,” he wrote. “I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters.”
The new revelations in the Missouri case come as anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the namesake son of a former U.S. attorney general, filed a class-action suit of his own against the Biden administration’s censorship.
