Fake News Gets A Boost As Trump Judge Rules Against Biden
Right wing Republicans call it “weaponizing” and “jawboning” when the government notifies social media companies that certain postings may result in deaths of millions or may spread lies that could directly undermine national security.
The government calls it an effort to protect the public from deadly misinformation.
The right wing, and particularly anti-vaxxers, scored a significant victory with a recent federal court ruling that will cripple the government’s efforts to limit potentially dangerous content. The ruling is expected to be appealed by the administration and it may ultimately be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans have claimed that the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies have coerced social media to suppress conservative speech and views that disagreed with the government.
Under the ruling, issued as a temporary injunction, the government can’t contact social networking about the false information that vaccines cause autism. Or the claims made public by the disgraced, right wing talk show host Alex Jones that the government is using chemicals to turn people and frogs gay.
Or Jones’ bogus reports that fluoride in drinking water is making people dumb and that the blatant lie that the vaccine to protect women from the dangerous Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is ruining lives and being pushed on young women around the world. Or the bogus claim made by many on the right, that climate change is a hoax and humans have no impact on climate.
The ruling was handed up by Terry A. Doughty, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, who was appointed to the bench by trump just a month before President Joe Biden took office.
The ruling came in the case of Missouri v. Biden, in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana joined with five individuals, psychiatrist and university professor Dr. Aaron Kheriaty; Harvard and Stanford epidemiologists and professors of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorf and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; Gateway Pundit owner and St. Louis resident Jim Hoft; and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines. They sued the Biden administration for allegedly colluding with and coercing social-media platforms “to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content.”
Doughty ruled this week that the federal government was in violation of the first amendment by calling on social media companies to reject what the government considers potentially dangerous commentary.
The most glaring example cited in a lawsuit and referred to by Doughty is the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s efforts to limit social media companies from publishing false claims about health cures, lies about the importance of vaccinations and false statements about the importance of masking and social distancing to control the spread of diseases.
One example cited by the plaintiffs involved comments by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022, about the ineffectiveness of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. Trump had claimed the drug was an effective treatment and the lawsuit said Fauci’s comments “suppressed speech on hydroxychloroquine.”
Doughty has a history of negative rulings regarding the COVID -19 pandemic. In 2021, he issued a nationwide injunction against a federal mandate that health care workers be vaccinated. His opinion repeated claims made by Dr. Peter McCollough, a cardiologist who was fired from his position as vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center for spreading what the hospital considered misinformation about COVID.
In early 2022, before trump stepped down from the presidency, Doughty issued an injunction on a federal mandate that would require workers at Head Start to be vaccinated and to wear masks to quell the spread of COVID-19.
Doughty’s ruling also will apply to commentary that could potentially upend democracy, as with the lies by trump that widespread fraud led to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, which, in turn, ultimately to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol by trump supporters. No more will the government be allowed to notify social media that such facts are totally bogus and should not be repeated.
As supposed evidence of the Democratic campaign to suppress social media, Republican officials have claimed that during the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Biden asked Twitter to hold of on publishing a story by the New York Post concerning information allegedly found on the laptop of Biden’s son, Hunter, in October 2020. The administration claimed the report was unsubstantiated and inaccurate and Twitter initially agreed but later reconsidered and posted the report.
The Republicans also claim that the government has engaged in “jawboning,” a phrase describing how government recommendations can be seen as tantamount to orders by social media. One alleged jawboning event cited in the lawsuit was the July 15 release by the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning of the perils of social media-disseminated misinformation related to the coronavirus. The advisory announced that 12 people were producing 65 percent of the anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms and called on Facebook, in particular, to take “faster action against harmful posts.”
In the words of Judge Doughty, during the pandemic the government violated the First Amendment, and “assumed a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”
The injunction granted by Doughty says that parts of the government cannot communicate with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” He also said exceptions to his ruling include efforts by the government to warn social media platforms about criminal activity, national security threats and foreign election interference.
The ruling was a result of a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, over requests for content removal by the Biden administration. Under Biden, the requests to social networking companies were largely over misinformation and disinformation about COVID and the presidential elections that violated Twitter’s policies.
Trump’s requests were largely political as with his administration’s request of Twitter to remove a “derogatory” tweet from model and television personality Chrissy Teigen. Trump also filed class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, accusing the companies of violating trump’s First Amendment rights when they took down, deprioritized, or banned trump’s speech.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who was formerly the Missouri attorney general from 2019 to 2023.
As attorney general, Schmitt filed lawsuits to have the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare invalidated by courts, sued school districts and municipalities for implementing mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, sued the Biden administration for its environmental policies, and signed onto an amicus brief that argued that LGBT people are not protected by workplace discrimination bans.
After Biden’s presidential victory, Schmitt joined other Republicans in claiming fraud and supported lawsuits to invalidate the 2020 election results. In April 2022, Schmitt repeated a posting about the “Great Replacement” theory, a claim that the Democratic Party seeks to “fundamentally” change the country through Illegal immigration to the United States.
Another plaintiff was Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry, who was formerly a congressman representing Louisiana’s 3rd congressional district.
Landry is a former St. Martin Parish sheriff’s deputy and a former police officer in Parks, La. Landry’s roommate was convicted of smuggling at least $10,000 worth of cocaine and hiding it underneath their home. Landry later resigned from the department but remained on as a reserve deputy until 2004.
While in Congress, Landry was a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry and a critic of President Barack Obama. In July 2012, Landry opposed establishment of a minor field in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies at the University of Louisiana. In Congress, Landry also argued under the First Amendment for student-led prayer and religious expression in public schools.
Also joining as plaintiffs were Dr. Aaron Kheriaty; Harvard and Stanford epidemiologists and professors of medicine, Dr. Martin Kulldorf and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; Gateway Pundit owner and St. Louis resident Jim Hoft; and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, Jill Hines.
Kheriaty has been fired from the University of California Irvine, where he has worked as a professor at UCI School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health for almost 15 years. He was dismissed because he argued that natural immunity puts people in a similar or better place than a vaccine to protect against COVID-19. The position has been rejected as unethical and infeasible by most scientists in the field of immunology including Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.
Kulldorff has been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2003, though on leave as of 2023. In 2020, Kulldorff, joined with Bhattacharya and Kheriaty to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through infection before vaccines became available, while promoting the false promise that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus. During the pandemic, Kulldorff also opposed vaccination of children, lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates.
Bhattacharya is the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He is opposed to lockdowns and mask mandates as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bhattacharya also has promoted the much-disputed contention that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus without vaccinations.
In 2004, Hoft launched the Gateway Pundit, a far-right website known for publishing lies, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories. A 2017 study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that The Gateway Pundit was the fourth most-shared source among trump supporters on Twitter during the 2016 election, behind Fox News, The Hill and Breitbart News.
In the 2016 presidential race, the Gateway Pundit promoted false rumors about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton’s allegedly, poor health.
In October 2017, The Gateway Pundit published an article falsely implicating an innocent person as the shooter in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Another report about the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, wrongly claimed the school shooter was a registered Democrat and that at least one of the teenage survivors of the shooting was a deep state pawn.
In November 2020, The Gateway Pundit erroneously stated that a software glitch during the 2020 presidential election led to 10,000 votes in Rock County, Wis., being “moved” from trump to Biden. The Gateway Pundit has promoted the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had “illegally inflated the COVID fatality number by at least 1,600 percent.”
Health Freedom Louisiana is a political and consumer advocacy group that insists that parents should make medical decisions on vaccinations and other matters for their children and not the government.