“I’ve never been more pleased by ‘losing’ in my life,” tweeted Jay Bhattacharya.
What makes the Director of the National Institutes of Health a “loser”?
Well, the doctor (who also serves as current Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control) has not always served in the federal government. In his days between Trump administrations he’d run afoul of censors on social media. Now he’s jubilant that a major case against censorship has come to a freedom-of-speech conclusion.
Aptly, he started that post on X with “Huzzah!”
The actual news? “The New Civil Liberties Alliance, on behalf of its clients Jill Hines and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty,” reads the official press release of the lawyers, “has reached a settlement agreement and Consent Decree concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship.”
This follows an executive order by President Trump on the first day of his new administration. The president had declared that the federal government, under President Joe Biden, had “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
This not a judicial ruling. It’s an agreement, the key point being, “The Parties agree that modern technology does not alter the Government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.”
Specifically, the agreement (in the lawyers’ words) “prohibits the U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and YouTube.” And more.
Director Bhattacharya calls it a “huge win for all Americans.”
You bet Huzzah!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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