Since acquiring Twitter last year, Elon Musk has echoed Republican arguments, releasing internal company documents to select journalists. Although it is not proven, Mr. Some of the documents Musk revealed ended up in arguments in the lawsuit.
The defendants, social media companies and disinformation experts argued that there was no evidence of a deliberate government effort to censor individuals in violation of the First Amendment. David Rand, an expert on misinformation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his understanding is that the government has little influence over how social media sites engage with misinformation.
At the same time, emails and text messages were made public in a case ruled by Judge Doughty, showing instances where authorities complained to social media administrators when influential users were spreading false information, particularly related to the coronavirus pandemic.
In their case, the states said they have a “sovereign and proprietary interest in accessing information in public discourse on social media platforms.”
In addition to the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, the suit was brought by four other plaintiffs: Jayantha Bhattacharya and Martin Guldorf, epidemiologists who questioned the government’s handling of the epidemic; Aaron Geriatti, a professor He was fired University of California, Irvine, for denying a coronavirus vaccine; Jill Hines is the director of Health Freedom Louisiana Alleged misinformation; and Jim Hoft, founder of the right-wing news site Gateway Pundit. Four additional plaintiffs claimed the social media sites removed some of their posts.
The lawsuit, which names President Biden and dozens of officials at 11 government agencies as defendants, cited some of the events that took place during the Trump administration.
In 2017, President Donald J. Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee to the federal court and sympathetic to conservative cases, previously blocked the Biden administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned a ban on oil and new federal leases. Gas drilling.
