Will we wind up waiting for decisions on them before we learn if my suit can move ahead? Only federal Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke knows...
This spring, the Supreme Court will decide a lawsuit brought by the state of Missouri over whether the federal government can press social media companies to censor their users.
The suit has become the most important First Amendment case in decades.
Last July, a federal district court ruled for Missouri, finding the Biden Administration had violated the Constitution by pushing tech companies to target users for legal speech. In September, a federal appellate court in Texas affirmed that ruling.
Now the Biden Administration has asked the high court to reverse those decisions, claiming they are wrong and hurt the government’s own right to inform the public. (The suit, first known as Missouri v Biden, is now called Murthy v Missouri, for Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, one of the Biden appointees appealing the ruling.)
And I doubt anyone - even the plaintiffs - is watching the case more closely than I am.
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(Is your right to free speech worth 20 cents a day? If it is, you know what to do.)
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The outcome in the Missouri case may be crucial to Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit against the White House and senior Pfizer officials for their efforts to censor me and force Twitter (now called X) to ban me and my reporting on mRNA Covid jabs in 2021.
I filed Berenson v Biden in New York in April 2023, drawing on documents I received as part of my earlier and successful lawsuit against Twitter over the ban.
The documents include a discussion inside Twitter of a meeting in April 2021 at which Andy Slavitt asked Twitter a “really tough question” about why it had not already banned me.
At the time, Slavitt was senior advisor to the White House Covid response team. He officially left the government in June 2021 but remained in contact with the Biden administration and kept pushing Twitter to ban me. Meanwhile White House and Pfizer officials applied further public and private pressure over what they called “misinformation.”
On August 28, 2021, they succeeded. Twitter banned me, claiming I had committed “repeated violations of [its] COVID-19 misinformation rules.” But just over 10 months later, the company settled my lawsuit against it by admitting it had violated its own rules in banning me and that my tweets “should not have led to [my] suspension.”
Crucially, the reinstatement was made by Twitter’s old management, months before Elon Musk took over the company and instituted an amnesty for banned accounts. As far as I know, I am the only person ever to be reinstated by any social media company after a ban lawsuit.
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(Q: How was the White House, guys?
A: Oh, not bad, except when they asked us to violate the First Amendment!)
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