Left: Preventing the Government from Censoring Free Speech is Censorship

The “clear message is to have this sort of chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”

After a federal judge issued a ruling ordering the federal government to stop “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

The lefty censorship lobby responded with pages of unhinged hysteria that failed to address the issue.

Conservatives were repeatedly accused of trafficking in false conspiracy theories to achieve this outcome. But if so, then why worry about the verdict? If the Biden administration isn’t actively urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing social media firms in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech, what could the problem possibly be?

Secondly, lefties and their media claimed that barring the government from advocating censorship was interfering in its free speech.

Here’s the government-funded NPR complaining that, “the government’s ability to fight disinformation online has suffered a legal setback that experts say will have a chilling effect on communications between federal agencies and social media companies.”

A chilling effect generally applies to government suppression of speech, not the suppression of government censorship.

“It’s hard to think of a more sweeping ruling,” says Evelyn Douek, an expert on the regulation of online speech and a professor at Stanford Law School.

“The injunction enjoins tens of thousands, maybe hundred [of] thousands of federal government employees from having almost any kind of communication with private platforms about content on their services,” Douek tells NPR. She notes that while there are exceptions for certain types of criminal content, overall, the “clear message is to have this sort of chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”

Actually, it’s pretty clear about what government employees can and can’t do. They can do most things like send a pineapple to Facebook by courier or ask it to remove pro-ISIS propaganda, what they can’t do is “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

Pretty clear.

The term ‘Orwellian’ gets thrown around far too much but here the Left has decided to argue that preventing government employees from censoring people has a chilling effect on their speech. One wonders what the old ACLU or any 1960s liberal would have made of that argument.

Big Tech used a variation of this argument to Florida bans on internet censorship, but the government doesn’t even have a platform. It and its allies are fighting for the right to go censoring.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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