Written by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry
Despite the breathtaking arrogance of the Biden Administration and his cadre of federal bureaucrats, the Louisiana Department of Justice has won an historic injunction against them: effectively stopping federal agencies and White House officials from colluding with social media companies to censor your protected speech. As of today, the Ministry of Truth is officially on notice.
The evidence of illegal censorship in this case is both shocking and overwhelming. In fact, as Judge Terry Doughty stated in his ruling, “if the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Our evidence shows systematic political bias across this federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which overwhelmingly targeted conservative political speech, especially speech criticizing the Biden Administration and its policies. For example, senior federal officials ultimately decided what Americans could and could not say on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others regarding COVID-19, elections, government officials, and more. Such actions made these federal officials self-appointed arbiters of truth for all Americans under the guise of fighting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
This was done, as claimed by senior national-security official Jen Easterly, the director of CISA, to protect America’s “cognitive infrastructure,” because it was “dangerous” to let Americans “pick their own facts.” In order to control this process, officials from the White House on down pressured, threatened, and berated social media platforms to stifle the speech of their political opponents, as well as everyday Americans on issues related to the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine injuries, the now-widely accepted lab leak theory, and even the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Our evidence also demonstrates that the FBI pressured social media platforms to perpetrate “account takedowns” of hundreds of American social media users on a monthly basis, as well as collaborated with CISA in acts of trickery and deception to further induce censorship by social media companies. The U.S. State Department also collaborated with CISA and private research groups to establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program across all major social media platforms — but that stops now.
Yesterday’s historic ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana is meant to stop this unconstitutional censorship in its tracks. As Judge Doughty observed, “the question does not concern whether speech is conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, or somewhere in-between. What matters is that Americans, despite their views, will not be censored or suppressed by the Government.” That is why we look forward to litigating this very important case to conclusion on behalf of all Louisianans and Americans injured by this shocking abuse of federal power.