“I’m not involved in any way on social media,” he said. “I don’t have an account. I don’t tweet, I don’t do Facebook and I don’t pay attention.”
Along with the states of Missouri and Louisiana, the plaintiffs include two prominent epidemiologists who questioned the government’s handling of the pandemic, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; dr Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatry professor fire from the University of California, Irvine, for refusing a Covid vaccination; Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that was accused of disinformation; and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that claims in its promotions that “we’ve been fighting big tech and leftists who want to shut us down for 15 years.”
Jenin Younes, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization representing individual plaintiffs, said the government has attempted to circumvent free speech rights by forcing private companies to take action against otherwise constitutionally protected discourse .
“It can’t use a third party to do something it can’t do,” she said in an interview at the organization’s Washington office.
There is no question that the Biden administration has used the bully pulpit on a range of issues, including urging Americans to get vaccinated and urging platforms to restrict accounts that have attempted to dissuade them .
The legal challenge for the plaintiffs is to show that the government used its legal or regulatory power to punish the companies when they failed to comply, which they often failed to do.
“No, that’s not feasible/we don’t do that,” a Twitter executive wrote, according to Twitter one of the Twitter files after Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked the company to delete accounts that post information about members of the committee.
