By John Ubaldi, “Ubaldi Reports”
One of America’s greatest and most cherished freedom’s is the right to free speech which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and one every president has sworn to uphold, until now, as President Biden has violated that very precept.
It was fitting that U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ordered an injunction on the very day America celebrated its Independence Day admonishing President Biden and his administration for violating the first amendment by censoring the free speech of American citizens.
This ruling by Judge Doughty was met with downright condemnation by Democrats and the Biden administration who rebuked the ruling and defiantly stating they will refrain in any way from altering the policy of censoring America’s first amendment rights on what they read or hear.
The Reason Foundation’s Eric Boehm reported, “The underlying case alleges that coordination between government officials and social media companies including Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) and Twitter routinely silenced opinions that challenged the mainstream narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic and other hot-button issues.”
Throughout Judge Doughty ruling alleges which is supported by mountains of evidence to include disclosures found in the Twitter Files—a series by independent journalists—and the Facebook Files—on how the federal government pressured and coerced social media into doing the governments bidding. Judge Doughty in his ruling highlighted hundreds of messages sent federal employees of the FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), other agencies, and individuals at the White House to moderators at Twitter, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), and Google by making it abundantly clear the federal government wanted these platforms to suppress dissenting viewpoints on a wide range of topics.
In Judge Doughty’s ruling those topics allegedly included, with the plaintiffs in the lawsuit who alleges that defendants suppressed conservative-leaning free speech, such as: (1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns; (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President Biden.
U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty also issued a sweeping preliminary injunction barring numerous federal officials and agencies — including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and all employees of the Justice Department and FBI — from having any contact with social media firms for the purpose of discouraging or removing First Amendment-protected speech.
For years there were allegations that Facebook was colluding with the federal government over censorship regarding issues surrounding information over Covid vaccines and the true origins of the pandemic.
After Facebook refused they finally relented after Congress threatened contempt sanctions on how the social media giant worked in conjunction with the federal government to censor its users. Finally Facebook yielded by releasing the “Facebook Files” which showed how through the government who insisted on censoring of officials and any information on Covid vaccine side effects, to include the origins.
In one aspect of the files, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs asked “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made.” The Vice President in charge of content policy responded, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”
What Judge Doughty ruled was followed up by the newly released “Facebook Files” revealed a disturbing and coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor not just false information, but also true information, by censoring what Americans can hear and read.
All of this came to an abrupt end when the House of Representative flipped to Republican control and the House Judiciary Committee finally was able and moved to hold Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress.
The release of the “Facebook Files” showed and confirmed what so many had suspected for years that Facebook was doing what was happening at Twitter which both social media companies were pressured by the government to senor all critics and any dissenting views.
Facebook mentioned that the government during its censorship operation were unwilling to take “no” for an answer and even went far beyond the social media companies own protocols.
In a column, Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University Jonathan Turley wrote, Twitter, executives described a deluge of demands for censorship from federal officials at the FBI and other agencies. One official wrote that “[t]he FBI has some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days.”
In January 2020, Twitter’s then-director of policy and philanthropy, Carlos Monje Jr., expressed unease about the pressure coming from the FBI. “They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”
Turley continued to write that we know that Facebook executives were facing the same insatiable government desire for censorship. In an April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, wrote to colleagues that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden who was steering COVID-19 policy, “was outraged — not too strong a word to describe his reaction — that [Facebook] did not remove this post.”
The Biden administration was targeting anyone who posed legitimate questions regarding the efficacy of masks, the protection of natural immunities, the harm pandemic measures were being posed to children. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House” to remove posts criticizing COVID-19 vaccines.
Just like Twitter, the Biden administration placed enormous pressure on Facebook, even as they had a huge censorship operation on the social media companies, President Biden still continued to want the social media giants to censor more American citizens. The very questions being raised and censored were valid and have turned out to be true, but those censored had careers and reputations ruined.
The continued censorship of Americans by President Biden revels a president who failed to uphold his constitutional role to uphold the very document he swore to uphold when he was swore to do on his inaugural ceremony in January 2021.
The other danger to America’s constitutional Republic is why the media has been silent on the greatest censorship and violation of America’s first amendment rights of free speech in American history; why?
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