XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, comp.misc   
   XPost: alt.politics   
   From: d@ray   
      
   On Monday, the censorship-industrial complex was put on trial when the   
   Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the landmark free speech case Murthy   
   v. Missouri.   
      
   Evidence in the case revealed that in the run-up to the 2020 election, and   
   increasingly thereafter, a raft of federal agencies both directly and via   
   cutouts cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media companies to   
   censor wrongthinking Americans at a magnitude of millions of posts on   
   matters ranging from the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to the   
   integrity of mass mail-in balloting and the efficacy of Covid vaccines.   
      
   The Louisiana district court that originally heard the case found, and a   
   5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed, that these efforts — emanating   
   from entities such as the Biden White House, FBI, and CDC to control the   
   digital public square, interfering in our elections and skewing public   
   policy debates — likely constituted a massive assault on the First   
   Amendment.   
      
   The feds, the courts suggested, had effectively turned the likes of   
   Facebook and X/Twitter into its deputized speech police, becoming state   
   actors whose “content moderation” decisions violated constitutional   
   restrictions on abridging speech.   
      
   The district court issued a preliminary injunction, that the appeals court   
   narrowed and modified but upheld, to freeze the speech policing during the   
   pendency of the case. It prohibited the Biden White House and implicated   
   agencies from taking any actions: “formal or informal, directly or   
   indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to   
   remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their   
   algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”   
      
   So the feds brought their case to the Supreme Court. Claiming that   
   restrictions on their ability to pressure social media companies to censor   
   would “irreparably harm” the government, violating its right to influence   
   the digital public square in support of the state’s national security and   
   public health agenda, it asked the court to rule on whether the government   
   had indeed engaged in a First Amendment violation of the highest order, and   
   on the “terms and breadth” of the preliminary injunction.   
      
   Most disturbingly, if oral arguments were any indication, it appears the   
   government may prevail and eviscerate our First Amendment in the process.   
      
   Irrespective of how it comes down in this case, the federal government’s   
   position combined with the clear-cut support from the court’s three   
   left-most judges speaks to the extent to which free speech is in deep   
   trouble in this country.   
      
   What follows are some of the most critical, and often disturbing, takeaways   
   from oral arguments.   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)