(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Former President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has sued Biden administration institutions and officials for violating the First Amendment, filing a massive class-action lawsuit that can potentially include millions of Americans who were deprived of accurate news during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 presidential election.
RFK Jr. and his Children’s Health Defense organization filed the lawsuit Friday, but they have yet to announce the action publicly.
The 121-page claim, which Headline USA has made available here, recaps much of what’s been reported in the Twitter Files—the trove of internal company documents that show the social media platform’s censorship decisions.
While many of these players engaged in their censorship efforts under the Trump administration, RJF Jr’s lawsuit does not name former Trump officials.
RFK Jr. said this is because the news censored in 2020 “appears to conflict with the interests of and positions taken by then-President Donald Trump”—making it doubtful that the White House was organizing or spearheading these federal censorship efforts at that time.
Plaintiffs potentially include “all persons in the United States who have consumed news related to COVID-19 or U.S. elections on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube at any time from January 2020 to the present,” according to the lawsuit.
“The claims of every Member of the proposed Class are united by a common, dispositive issue of law: whether the federal government’s systematic, concerted campaign to induce social-media companies to censor constitutionally protected violates the First Amendment and should be enjoined,” the lawsuit said.
As for RFK Jr., the outspoken anti-vaccine advocate said he has standing as one of the plaintiffs because he, like millions of other Americans, was harmed in his ability to gather news concerning U.S. elections and COVID—including facts about mortality, vaccines and alternative treatments.
“To take just one of numerous examples, the above censorship prevented Kennedy from knowing the number and seriousness of first-hand accounts of vaccine injuries and reporting that information to his followers,” the lawsuit said.
“Kennedy has also been directly censored on social media and de-platformed entirely from major platforms,” it added.
RFK Jr. and Children’s Health Defense can represent a class of millions in this lawsuit because they are “passionately dedicated to the freedom of all persons in this country to make health care and citizenship decisions on the basis of full, accurate information uncensored by the government,” the lawsuit stated.
“In addition, Plaintiff [Children’s Health Defense] will zealously represent the interests of the Class because of its institutional interests in protecting its own members, who are also Class Members,” the lawsuit said. “And Plaintiff Kennedy will be a zealous Class representative because he has himself been the victim of the Defendants’ massive, unconstitutional censorship campaign.”
The lawsuit seeks a court declaration that the Biden administration and other defendants violated the First Amendment, an order that prevents the defendants from engaging in censorship again and any other relief the court deems proper.
This lawsuit follows a separate suit RFK Jr. and Children’s Health Defense filed in January against the so-called “Trusted News Initiative” over similar issues.
In that case, RFK Jr. claimed that TNI members—including Google/YouTube, Twitter, Reuters, Meta and the Washington Post—colluded to suppress news from smaller media outlets.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
