 All right. Hello and welcome to the reason live stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller and today we're going to be talked about a very interesting legal case Working its way up through the federal courts that cuts to one of the most important free speech issues of our time When does government communication with social media companies Cross the line from voluntary partnership into illegal censorship? Is there even such a line? The case is known as Missouri v. Biden though as we'll see soon There are many more plaintiffs and defendants involved and joining me today to dig into the details is one of the plaintiffs Someone likely familiar to our audience Dr. J. Botticharia, professor of medicine economics and health research policy at Stanford University And pertinent to this conversation one of the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration Which prompted NIH director Francis Collins to call for a swift and devastating takedown to of its calls to end lockdowns in favor of focus protection Jay, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me Zach Also here is John Vecchioni senior litigation counsel with the new civil liberties alliance a nonprofit law firm representing Jay and several other parties to the lawsuit He knows this material inside it out and we'll really be able to explain the legal intricacies at play here John, thank you for talking with us today. It's good to be here For our audience we are live today and hope to get to some of your questions so leave those in the chat and we'll get to them soon But first for you John a little background on NCLA I'm somewhat familiar because you handled another case I reported on challenging a medical misinformation law in California But what is the new civil liberties alliance and how and why did you all get involved in this case which was originally brought by the state attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana Right that was probably the HOBE case but what I'm for us the new civil liberties was founded about five years ago by Phil Hamburg He's a professor at Columbia University who has done seminal work on the administrative state Which is the administrative agencies uncontrolled by Congress or even the executive in some cases and so we sue administrative agencies primarily but not always for going beyond their statutory remit or violating the Constitution And that's our mission and that's what we do and that's what we're doing here How we got involved in this is we actually had a case before Missouri v. Biden called Chang Easy that's on appeal in the sixth circuit and originally brought by my once in future colleague Jeanine Eunice who was here and she went away Congress for a little bit. She's now back but she's on Twitter so she knew all these people associated with the great barrington statement and a number of other COVID and lockdown activities and so they brought this problem to her We brought the Chang Easy case and the attorney generals of both Louisiana and Missouri who had brought this case looked at it you'll see the complaints are very similar and they called us and said you know we have this case down here as well Do you have anybody you know who could join it and I thought well yes we do and so Jay and Aaron Karate and Martin Koldorf and Jill Heinz all joined this case and we represent them all in Missouri v. Biden bringing up sort of different aspects than the states can bring up on what the problem is here You mentioned that a focus of the new civil liberties alliance is taking cases against the administrative state the overreach of the administrative state could you describe what is the key importance of that mission to you why is why is that an important front in protecting Americans liberties Because we have a constitution it has separation of powers there are things the executive is supposed to do the Congress supposed to do and the judges the judiciary is supposed to do What the administrative state does and has been pushed for doing for about a hundred years is mush all these together so that you lack the responsiveness that Congress is supposed to have to the people You lack the accountability the president supposed to have and his duty to enforce the laws as written rather than as he'd like them to be and oftentimes you have them making judiciary type decisions without all the protections of due process So you really get around the Constitution if you allow these administrative agencies to get out of hand and this case is a great example of it the first amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech Right well that abridgement it doesn't just mean you know that that that they can't pass a law but it also means the government can't abridge those by doing other things and in this case the administrative agencies were on every social media platform Screaming at them to get certain messages and actual individual people off the new public square and they don't have any remit for this the way we got involved in the shang easy case was the surgeon general is sending Request for production to all these social media companies and what they're putting out there about covert and about the vaccines well you can read every every little statute about the surgeon general does he doesn't have any power to do that he can't be telling social media companies what to do he has a uniform and a platform he doesn't have He doesn't have the ability to take documents from these places or to threaten them but with the administrative state behind him he does We're going to get into all of that trying to figure out what what those boundaries are and whether or not the administrative state over stepped them and we're going to look at the documents we're going to look at the case The case is complaint we're going to play some clips but before we start digging into that material J what are you personally hoping gets accomplished in this case as a plaintiff who is saying that you were directly affected by it My primary goal in this case is to restore free speech so that science can actually function again. I think during the pandemic what we've seen is that the federal government agencies use their muscle and power to elevate one brand of science I believe a deeply flawed brand of science that made tremendous mistakes about you know masking toddlers or or what not but in order to get their way rather than apply reason rather than the fund rigorous studies to test hypotheses instead what they did is they effectively smothered the voices of people who were criticizing their own misinformation in the name of suppressing misinformation You know and we're talking about federal government agencies. John mentioned the Office of Surgeon General but also if you if you look it was the National Institute of Health who ordered the devastating takedown of the Great It was the CDC it was the White House itself directly involved in threatening social media companies telling them who to censor and what to censor simply because they were being criticized by outside critics that they didn't that with with whom they disagreed I mean you know the White House already has a bully pulpit they could have said we don't agree with these scientists on these facts fine What they did instead was they went to the social media companies said if you allow these scientists to say these things if you allow these ideas to go on your platform we're going to go after you we're going to attack you What I would like from this case is that there to be a bright line so that no government agency ever again decides that it has the power to suppress scientific discussion in this country I think I think it's fundamental and vital for scientific science to function that the government agencies that have an invested interest in people believing their view of science not be allowed to censor outside critics And if we can get that I'll be I'll view this as an enormous victory But let's see if we can find that bright line and to do so let's start with the biggest let's zoom out and start with the big picture just to see what what are the kind of the big constitutional questions at stake here This is the case and it's a as you can see these are the defendants. This is just the first three pages of defendants there's a three and a half more pages. It's a real you know rogues gallery here going from Biden to the surgeon general to every single spokesperson to the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency so I you know know what there's seemingly no part of the federal government untouched by this case because they were all involved in regulating the flow of information misinformation disinformation from this time period from 2016 to I guess present Missouri. This is from the complaint. Here are some of the specific instances of what you call social media censorship in the complaint one, the hunter Biden laptop story to speech about the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins. Three speech about the efficacy of mask mandates and COVID-19 lockdowns and for speech about election integrity and the security of voting by mail and we'll try to get to all of these I'm not sure if we will but we'll just take them one by one. This is the legal principle that you articulate your citing a case called Biden be night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and it says that the quote from Justice Thomas concurring is that the government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. John is that what you're arguing happened in this case and if so how it is. So the way these cases have come about is that some people sue the social media companies. They say you've you've you've shut off my my speech and you've hurt me in that way. So the traditional view of the law is that if I run a newspaper I don't have to run your articles. I don't have to. They have their own free speech rights right so they can do what they want if they're unaffected by the government. What I found over the years and it came up in bookseller cases in places like this is that the sheriff or the local authorities would go in and say look we're going to crack down on you if you don't get rid of this book and that book and the other book or just just come by repeatedly and say you know we really don't like these books here in our town. We don't think you should carry those and there's some bad people who are going to who are going to read these books and do bad things and not and then the threat isn't over. And in those cases the Supreme Court has said look you can't do that that is that is a threatening threatening act that you have no legal right to do if Congress said we're going to remove those books we all know that's not allowed right. So the the executive can't go around and getting the same result through through means of either intimidation or overly pressuring them just just constantly being in their face. And one of the cases I noticed that was cited was the case of back page which has been covered extensively here at Reason by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Dietrich about the way that you know local law enforcement strong armed this publication because they didn't like that they were publishing ads that went to the checking they went to the credit card people who funded them right so right so how was that yeah just explain a little bit more how that's pertinent to this case. So there what they did was they they went to the credit card companies and they said that these are all lender risk and this type of thing and we have great concerns with this back page had had like prostitution and and I think child trafficking I think was the allegation but they didn't go after them for that. Take the prostitution and the and the child trafficking laws and go after back page they went to the to the checking the credit card companies and said we think this is risk for them and we really think you shouldn't you shouldn't allow your services for back page. And that has the effect of taking back page down and that was again they were really trying to abridge speech they weren't trying to enforce the laws that they had that they could have gone and done. And just before we I want to ask Jay about a specific instance of social media takedown that he experienced but before moving to that one more point on just kind of the the big frame of the case which is called Missouri v Biden. This is not this started under Trump as a lot of people have pointed out to me since we started kind of promoting this stream. This is not a partisan thing you know the kind of administrative state is consistent from one administration to another. It's just that Biden right now is the president so he's the named defendant is that more or less correct. Yeah. Do you want me to take that. Oh yeah yeah exactly correct. So this goes to the administrative state issue right. Most of what Jay's talking about with NIH and CDC all happened under Trump and he had given it appears a lot of running room to Dr. Fauci and to the heads of CDC. And you saw the administrative agencies kind of directing this stuff without without a lot of pushback from from the White House in those in those circumstances. So I do think that this is an administrative state problem not a who's in office problem. And and they they then went about being the world's authority on everything and that that's fine. They can say they're the world's authority and we know best but what they can say is so shut up that guy who differs from my view is the world authority. And you know one one more detail just to touch on before we get to Jay here is that a US District Court on July 4 of this year actually granted you all the preliminary injunction and what they said there was that that that all of these government employees are restrained from the following actions as to social media companies meeting with social media companies for the purpose of encouraging them to remove content flagging content urging them to do any of this emailing them collaborating threatening basically any sort of back and forth was prohibited by this judge and now just last week the for the appeal to that was heard. So what is the status of things right now is the government allowed to continue this job owning as this kind of plays itself out or it was was that lifted. It was there was in so it was an existence for about a week and and then and then an administrative the government the day after July 4 this is issued on July 4 by Judge Dowdy I think to send a message and and the day after the government appealed. So from July 5 and then it was just don't argue before the 5th Circa on August 10 that is lightning fast in the legal business. But what the 5th Circa did was they issued an administrative stay of the injunction. What that means is we don't we're not doing anything on the merits but you guys just dropped hundreds of pages of briefs on us and we need administratively time to read this stuff. And we're going to stay it there. Not anything I'm going to do with the merits having to do how judges have to do work. You mentioned in that in the previous answer when we were talking about this this all started obviously under the Trump administration. That's the majority of what Jay experienced when he was speaking out against covid policies. There's one particular instance I want to zoom in on in which you appeared in a video with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and several epidemiologists for roundtable and this was in March 2021. That video was removed by YouTube. We're going to play a clip from it right now and I want to get your reflections on what happened there. I think the lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history. I think the lockdowns have have as Martin said have failed to protect the vulnerable. Dr. Gupta mentioned about you know not putting mass on kids. It's not effective. Not necessary. Martin Boulder. Do you agree in school. There's no need for them to be wearing face masks. Children should not wear face masks. No they don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people either. Okay. I mean I think schools how do you teach a child to read with face masks on on zoom or you know I think I think the children develop by watching other people. And I think it's developmentally inappropriate and it just doesn't help on the Z spread. I think it's absolutely not the right thing to do. So I mean the striking thing looking in the rear view mirror is that this is more or less what I think reasonable people agree with at this point especially the mask point. I mean that that became policy in Florida shortly after this and there wasn't some sort of explosion of you know childhood deaths or deaths in schools. But putting that aside the reason I play included the mask part is that that's what YouTube said was their reason for removing that video from their platform. What was your reaction when that happened back in March of 2021. I mean I was incensed. I mean Zach I had before I prepared for that event that the governor had invited me to come out by looking at the literature on child masking. And I couldn't find a single randomized study that demonstrated in fact there was no evaluation no randomized evaluation of child masking at all. And the the evaluation of masking the high quality randomized evaluations of masking of adults of preventing for instance the spread of the flu had found nothing. Same thing with for covid specifically there was a Danish study this randomized data study that found no ability to the mask in adults for surgical masks versus versus no mask for stopping you from getting covid no significant effect. And so I mean I knew that there was that there was no support a high quality data in the literature about this and I also had heard from so many parents brought you know autistic with autistic kids of hearing paired kids telling me that their kids were suffering because of the of the. These requirement for masking so I was pretty confident that I was right scientifically when I made that statement I of course you're doing it in public so you have to do it in a way that's accessible to people. And I don't think I what I said was wrong there certainly is within the realm of scientific discussion of you know to have that. And so when YouTube suppressed that video of a sitting governor talking to a scientific advisors in public so he so that the public can understand the scientific basis for which he's making decisions. I was stunned I mean I thought I thought like I thought like good government group should be fairer that even if you disagree with what I said at least you want to know what the advice the governor is getting right that should be public. It's within the scientific bounds like there's I knew there was scientific disagreement about this although in retrospect there shouldn't have been any like it was really really clear that there was no good strong evidence in favor of the masking at all. In fact not even not even real even the weak evidence was not convincing the weak evidence being like bad correlational studies. So I still am stunned to this Zach I can't understand and you know the effect of it wasn't that you couldn't see the video the effect of it really was to defame me and and other scientists who disagreed with the government. About these masking studies the whole purpose was to say well look these guys are friends scientists so fringe that it's dangerous to have their views even up on YouTube. It is and you know it's it's looking back I mean I blame YouTube at the time I didn't understand at the time that the government itself had a had a had a big you know so push to try to get this kind of message off YouTube because they didn't want their policies to be criticized. Yes and that's what the heart of this case is is trying to kind of examine exactly what the government's involvement behind the scenes was and whether they stepped over that line and where it's where that that interaction starts to get revealed is in another example that you were involved with which is you butting heads with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. I shouldn't even say butting heads because this was all going on and you know private emails that were later revealed but this is a headline from October 2020 where Dr Fauci says letting the coronavirus spread to achieve herd immunity is nonsense and dangerous. He said this a version of this to several media outlets during this time period and you all John deposed Dr Fauci and I've pulled a clip from that deposition where he talks about his reaction to the the Great Barrington Declaration which was a letter that you and several other. Scientists signed Jay which basically said that lockdowns aren't working they're detrimental a better strategy would be what you call what you called focus protection where you try to shield the most vulnerable people from the virus is as much as possible. Fauci what will you let other people kind of live their lives. Fauci thought that was a dangerous and nonsense idea. And this is what he had to say when questioned in deposition about about that time period. It's roll that clip for a second as Dr Fauci says letting the coronavirus spread to achieve herd immunity is quote nonsense and quote dangerous. Correct. That is correct. You believe you still believe that. Do I believe that the Barrington Declaration premise of letting the virus rip through society and infect people leading to their illness hospitalization and death is nonsense and dangerous. I still do. Are you an epidemiologist. I'm an infectious disease person with some pretty good experience in epidemiology. Our doctor is doctor about a chariot epidemiologist. I don't know I guess you'll have to look up as credentials. So your statement was made within 2 days of Dr Collins a statement to the Washington Post. Correct. Right. Did you guys coordinate on making those statements. Did you discuss it with each other that you're going to make these statements criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration. Other than the emails you've already seen. I don't believe so. But I'm not one. No I don't. That's not our style to be coordinating things. But I don't know. It's possible we discussed it depends on what your definition of coordination is. And the same time frame. Did you become aware that the Great Barrington Declaration was being censored in social media. I'm not aware of any censorship of of anything like I said multiple times and I'll repeat it again for the record. I don't follow what goes on on social media censoring or otherwise that's not something that I pay attention to. Okay so two questions out of that first one for Jay. Just your immediate reaction to what statue saying there in this deposition. It's propaganda Zach. It's absolute propaganda. So as you said as you described it is an accurate description of what we did said and wrote in the Great Barrington Declaration. We were not calling for letting the virus rip. And the evidence was very clear that the lockdowns especially in the spring had failed to protect older and vulnerable people from there. Many many many older vulnerable people had died from the virus. Despite the lockdowns. There was the counter example of Sweden which had which had better outcomes and much of the rest of Europe and certainly much of the rest of the United States. Which had not locked down and not close schools had had had adopted more reasonable protection of what making it a priority to protect vulnerable older people. The strategies that that that Dr. Fauci had espoused at the time had failed and it cost tremendous damage to the poor, the children, the working class. At the time in the summer of 2020 there were estimates that 100 million people will be thrown into poverty worldwide because of the economic dislocation caused by Dr. Fauci's lockdowns. 130 million people according to the World Food Program of the UN were going to be we're at risk of dire food insecurity meaning starvation. The lockdowns were tremendously damaging the health of the of the world and Dr. Fauci, rather than trying to grapple with the actual critique we had essentially organized a propaganda campaign. You can see when that CNBC thing he went around saying that we want that he set up a straw man said oh let the virus rip. No, that was not we were not calling for letting the virus we were calling for better protection of vulnerable older people. We were not taking seriously enough and it was dangerous to let the lockdowns continue, which unfortunately we did. And that that deposition is so interesting. He denies initially talking or coordinating with Collins, even though the language they used was almost identical nonsense. He says then he realizes I guess that he's under oath and backtracks right in real time you see that in real time he says oh my maybe I might have spoken I don't remember. I think I think and then when you asked about censorship is like oh I don't I don't read social media is if that's responsive to the question. 179 times in that deposition he says I don't recall on basic scientific matters on on on like conversations and even when he has emails put in front of me doesn't recall I'm sure he's a very busy man. But it beggars the imagination to think that he he who is the architect of the lockdown policies that we followed recalls so few of the details of the key key key sort of moments around this. I mean I was stunned watching that deposition and I think anyone that watches it with with an open mind can say look we were not led well by the government scientists during the pandemic. And John picking up on that point of whether or not there was coordination here which Fauci says they were not coordinating or it kind of depends on what you mean by coordinating. I mean we do know because of these emails that there was the call for the quick and devastating takedown and then as just mentioned there was some similar language kind of put out there into the media. Is that evidence to you of coordination. And if so, does that actually kind of approach the line of, you know, illegally suppressing speech, even if they were coordinating. And he goes, they went way over that line because there's other things going on here he's talking to Francis Colin, they have an email email says we got to take down the Great Barrington it's not it's not like I'm I'm I have like some sort of suspicion here I've got the email where they say that right with that. And so Collins is is out there, pushing these things down and CDC has a meeting with the social media I that was that deposition was taken by john sour that's the voice you hear there, and he doesn't push back on Fauci he lets him go, because John sour knows as well as I and J know that the Great Barrington declaration didn't say letter rip. That was the propaganda that that Collins and Fauci were putting out there, and then the CDC was telling YouTube and everyone else that this letter rip thing is very dangerous and you got to take it down. Now Fauci did not my knowledge. He wasn't in those meetings but CDC was who was under I think Collins was there. So, so, of course they were coordinating the this was what was is called a whole of government effort. So every single agency that could was taking part in it. And so the idea that there's no coordination when every single agency is doing this meeting many times with these with these social media companies is simply wrong. And the, the idea that Fauci wasn't trying with the CDC, the head of the CDC communications with the social media. She said, at her deposition, I was trying to downgrade these other messages, I because I asked, did you try to get them removed, she said, I think she said either moved or downgraded way down so people didn't see them. So it's not, it's not, it's not speculation. They said they were doing this. They, they said that it's good and they said they'll do it again. That's what's going on. Let's look at how that whole of government effort functioned, at least according to your argument. And by the way, I promise all of our viewers and listeners that we're going to be bringing up some of the counter arguments to have you respond to them. I actually have some of the oral arguments so you'll be able to respond directly to what the other side is saying but first I just want to lay out your case a little bit more clearly and with this whole of government effort. Part of what you're saying in the complaint is that during a certain time period, the CDC and the entire the Biden administration staff, the entire kind of federal public health apparatus was geared towards doing everything it could to pressure the social media companies to kind of, you know, apply the boots on the neck or you know, hang the sort of Damocles or whatever metaphor you want to use over them. And we're just going to play a couple clips to illustrate or remind people of what was going on publicly during that time period. And the first clip is this famous one of Biden saying that the social media companies are literally leading to people dying. So let's play that clip real quick. President accuses social media companies of killing people for allowing vaccine myths to circulate online. They're killing people. I mean, it really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And then during, you know, around that same time period, this is when the Vic Murthy, the surgeon general at the time was demanding data on COVID-19 misinformation from major tech firms. So he had put out, you know, I'm sure a very friendly letter asking, could you please turn this stuff over to us. And he had also made a speech saying that misinformation is actually public health menace. We've pulled that clip. I want to play that for a moment too. And then ask Jay to react to kind of the public health messaging of the time. I issued a surgeon general's advisory on the dangers of health misinformation. Surgeon general advisories are reserved for urgent public health threats. And while those threats have often been related to what we eat, drink and smoke, today we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation's health. What do you think of that message that was coming from the surgeon general Murthy at the time, Jay, as someone who is in the field of public health, you know, bad information obviously can be bad for people's health if they don't follow the right advice. What did you think when you saw that? I thought it was a dangerous abuse of his power. I mean, I think it is absolutely right for the surgeon general to say, here's what the scientific, here's our view of what the scientific evidence says regarding, you know, sort of whatever, trans fats, smoking, whatever, even for COVID. Here's my view. Here's our view of the scientific evidence, right? But they have an obligation to express what all of the science, what the range of scientists are saying, not to take one view, even in those kinds of pronouncements, they need to be much more broad minded if they can. Here it's even a step further. What they're saying is that they are so right that they're in their view about, for instance, you know, masking toddlers that anyone that says that masking toddlers doesn't work is spreading this information that you should, and it's dangerous. Or the vaccine misinformation, you know, the idea that the vaccine protects you against COVID. Well, you know, a lot of people even by that time were starting to get COVID despite being vaccinated. They were very worried if you look at the legal filings about that fact getting out. You know, there's a funny story in the legal filings in Missouri versus Biden. It turns out that in fact, the White House itself was suppressed and its Facebook page suppressed because it was tagged as an anti-vax group. The White House was because in, I think, just a month later after that, I think after that piece in March, the White House, the CDC put out a warning that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was causing strokes in middle-aged women. And it paused the J&J vax. My colleague, Martin Kuldiff, actually wrote an op-ed saying that the CDC had acted prematurely. He wrote a pro-vax column. The White House pressure on Facebook to suppress anti-vax propaganda caught the White House up because it then put the CDC's pause of the J&J vax up. It got tagged by the algorithms as an anti-vax group. And then you have emails from Rob Flaherty of the White House screaming at Facebook saying, why are you suppressing the spread of information, true information by the White House? You know, they basically created an engine to try to suppress honest scientific discussion. And Vivek Murthy, I mean, he's going to go down in history as one of the most irresponsible certain generals in history. He himself was spreading misinformation at the time he organized a campaign to defame people who were criticizing him for the spread of his misinformation. And I'll just add, I think the algorithm also, they had super spreaders of misinformation, COVID misinformation, and how many times you posted was part of the algorithm. So I think it was either the Facebook or the Instagram, I forget which it was, but Bidens became a super spreader of misinformation on the government website in the very trap that they had set up to shut up everyone else. And when it happened to them, Jay's being very, very, he's said it very nicely. Rob Flaherty's emails are sailor-like in their anger that this happened. So they set up this net to shut everyone else up. It caught them and they were unhappy with it. And it's very well established at this point that there was an ongoing relationship between these various federal agencies and the social media companies in light of the Twitter files, the Facebook revelations that Robby Suave had reason as reported on, and that we've covered here on the stream this, what Jacob Siegel calls the counter disinformation complex. I encourage anyone interested in the stuff to watch any of those conversations that we've previously had. The question that this lawsuit is trying to get to is when does that sort of collaboration become a kind of involuntary suppression of speech that the social media companies are forced to do on behalf of the government? You know, what we're talking about, in fact, Murthy, this is from the complaint. It says that after President Biden stated that Facebook was killing people, a senior executive at Metta reached out to Murthy to engage in damage control and appease the president's wrath. And that he sent text messages to him noting it's not great to be accused of killing people and expressing he was keen to find a way to de-escalate and work together collaboratively. Now, in a second, we're going to get to some of the possible threats that were being held against these companies. But just in a hypothetical sense, would these kind of interactions, in your opinion, John, be illegal? Would they be crossing a line to just be kind of having an open channel between the government and social media companies and social media companies saying, hey, we don't want bad information, harmful stuff all over our platforms. It's useful to us to consult with the CDC or NIH or whoever else. Well, I notice this. I notice it's not them making the calls. The government's always calling. But so I think there's, I think that even there, there is a coercion of some sort because it is the government. But if they want to talk, if they want to get information from the government, the government can provide information to people the way it does to you or me. I'll give you an example. During the Cold War, a lot of times, the New York Times, the Washington Post or somebody would get information about spies, right? Or something that was going on in a foreign country. And they would call the White House or they'd call the CIA or whoever and say, we're going to put out a newspaper story. And the CIA would say, look, we got to get our guy out of there. Can you delay for two days, three days, whatever it was? And the papers would do that voluntarily. There wasn't really a threat towards them or anything. They just didn't want to get any American asset kill. So if it's that sort of thing, it's not a problem. But here it is constantly calling them. I do think there's a difference between, or they could put it on their website. They could put it on their PC or NIH. They have websites. They could put any information there. And if that were the case, if the social media just read their websites and said, you know what, I agree with the government. I'm going to do that. That would be a different story. But that's not what's happening here. It's very interesting that you mentioned the Twitter files, but we had all this discovery we got in this case as well. None of this stuff was out in the open. They didn't tell the regular public they were doing this. When we first brought these cases here at New Civil Liberties, we had to look, what's happening with Murphy? What are they doing? Why is this happening? Is this just a coincidence? We didn't have the actual emails or meetings or all that that we have now. So it wasn't like they were telling anybody, this is what I'm doing. So people like Jay or people, I wasn't on social media then. They all thought it was just these social media companies. So that is another problem here. Yeah. I mean, that's what really piqued my interest about this case is a lot of the discussion in past years has been about are there things that can be done to like kind of bend the social media companies to our will and make them moderate neutrally. And I know that's part of your lawsuit. And I want to talk about that a little bit, but the main part of your lawsuit, it has to do. I mean, you're the defendants in your lawsuit are government actors. It's not the social media companies. And I think you're it's very clearly seeing that this was what you're going after is the what you're alleging is the coercion in this case. And I think that is really the right place to be focused. And we're going to talk about some of the coercive tactics in just a second that you lay out. But first, I just want to bring up a couple audience questions. One is Claude Asher saying is anyone in control of the administrative state. Also, Claude said COVID is just the start. I guess to for both those questions, you know, I, I want to leave it open to either of you to jump in here but how I guess john first since you're the one who is with the law firm that goes after the administrative state, how much more difficult or easy is it to hold the administrative state accountable then say elected politicians. So it's difficult, at least the electric politicians can be voted out. You can't vote out any bureaucrats. And that is that is the problem. I think that they can be controlled by an active executive, but we didn't we haven't really seen that in COVID we've either seen, let them do what they want, or we said, seen help them. I do want to say something that you just said does remind me though, I think everyone who got into this thought well Silicon Valley they probably want to keep certain views out because they're all a mono a mono culture with all the same views right and all that. We didn't find that. I mean, all the lawyers on this case I think have been kind of stunned that Facebook was pushing back. You, they were all pushing back and back at one point Facebook said well you know, in the scientific area, you're probably hurting this because if you're wrong that things won't get out and also you'll make people paranoid if they find out that you're keeping views down. Facebook's telling it like straight First Amendment stuff they're telling the government and the government's yelling at him about it. So it was not the case and I think that makes our case stronger that these companies were all like yeah we want to do this we'd be doing this without this pressure without these calls and these threats. Well, let's talk about what they yeah please do. Yeah, it's just real fast. So I think I think the key thing here is is that the government that the public trust in the government had collapsed. Certainly by the during the Trump administration but then then then during the Biden administration it had utterly collapsed. Why is Murphy sitting there is talking about suppressing speech on Facebook because people don't believe him. Right people don't people do not trust him people don't trust the government people don't why is Anthony Fauci looking like he's a you know use car salesman and in the in that deposition. You know, denying the obvious fact that he spoke with college it's because people didn't trust him anymore. The the recourse to this kind of coercive power this suppression and violation of First Amendment rights happened because the government failed to garner the trust of the American public. And they're they're they're they're acting in this way because they they they they don't know how else to regain the trust if if instead what they had done is they engage with the outside critics. You know sort of maybe done with the governor of Florida did like have a have a round table except bring more people in. You know I have a I remember one point during the 2008 debate over over Obamacare. There was a fantastic discussion between you know opposing points of view overseen by the President of the United States right have that debate openly with scientists on like have have Martin Cooldorf and and Tony Fauci in the same room televised. Right that would have engendered much more trust rather than what they ended up doing so the reason why they're doing this is because they're their propaganda campaign. Their propaganda campaign had failed to convince most of the American public that they were right if they were so right if the scientific evidence on their side they wouldn't need to engage in coercion they would just sit they could just point the scientific evidence they look at works. This is what works that they couldn't do that. So what would your lesson be from that say you know God forbid another pandemic hits or there's some sort of emergency where people are afraid and they just want a simple answer that and they're you know the. I think that a lot of this comes from like there's this fog of confusion with all the information that's out there and the way the people in the government we're thinking was like we just need to have like the one answer and kind of push all this stuff other stuff down because we're in an emergency. How what what would be a better way to react to an emergency the next emergency. I mean I don't think that you should be looking for gurus that have the answer as soon as you find somebody who says to you if you contradict me you're not contradicting a man you're contradicting science itself well that that person you shouldn't be trusting. In a complicated situation like this you need a very very wide array of voices some of whom are going to disagree with each other. If I were in charge of the messaging and decision making around at the CDC or the NIH or elsewhere what I would have done is I would embrace that fact and treated the American public like adults. I would have told them here's what we know here's what we don't know here's what's complicated here's and I certainly wouldn't fear mongered fear is natural response to the threat of a virus like this. It's completely understandable the job of public health is to push back against that fear to say here's what we know here's what we're doing to develop information to provide good information when it's when it's rock solid and then and then to embrace the ambiguity when it's that's what the science is saying to embrace the the the cacophony of voices as opposed to and then you know of course they can have their view to I think treating the American public like adults would have been far better would have engendered more trust we've gotten better results where you know then we did which is essentially by saying look Tony Fauci's view is the only view that matters everyone else is misinformation that by itself I think is responsible for tremendous amount of the damage that happened during the pandemic. You know I mean especially in the digital age where we have all the digital receipts and everyone's you know collective memory so to speak is much longer because you can just go back and look at what people said and compare it to the reality of what played out. I do want to turn to the mechanism that you're alleging was used to strong arm or job in these companies into submission and that happens to be section 230 of the communications decency act which we've covered a lot at reason we are kind of defenders in principle of what it's trying to accomplish just to remind people what it is sorry this is the wrong slide. There's a section where you have it summarized here in the complaint. It says that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material. That the provider or user considers to be obscene lewd lascivious filthy excessively violent harassing or otherwise objectionable. In summary section 230 says that platforms cannot be held liable for user generated content as long as it's lawful speech and that has given them a lot of ability to grow because it would be. Pretty much impossible to run a social network if you had to be constantly checking everything that someone posted to make sure it's not defaming somebody or you know making some sort of. You know comment that someone's going to sue you the provider over and that is something so it's essential to the existence of these platforms and it's something that Biden. And his team over this time period has consistently and continually said they want to take a look at and they have set it under circumstances where it's quite close to where they are talking about. They don't like the behavior that these platforms are engaging in or what they're allowing to proliferate. So let's start with a clip of candidate Biden in January 2020 saying this to the New York Times editorial board. Mr. Vice President in October your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. And I'm curious did that experience dealing with Facebook and their power. Did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now. No I've never been a fan of Facebook as you probably know. I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem then being exempt which you're not exempt. You can't write something you're knowing to be false and being exempt from being sued but he can't. Section 230 should be revoked immediately should be revoked. Number one for Zuckerberg and other platforms. That's a pretty foundational love of the modern. That's right. Internet. Exactly right. And it should be revoked. It should be revoked. Because it is not merely an Internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false. And we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing it relative to privacy. You guys still have editors I'm sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It's irresponsible. It's totally irresponsible. If there's proven harm that that Facebook has done should someone like Mark Zuckerberg be submitted to criminal penalties perhaps? He should be submitted to civil liability in his company to civil liability just like you would be here at the New York Times. So there's Biden coming in hot Zuckerberg. That guy's a real problem. And then once he got in office I've got two clips from his press secretary that I want to play in succession. The first is from around that same time period. Yeah, it's from Jen Psaki. It's from around that same time period that the Murthy statement came out. So let's play that one first. Jen Psaki really likes Section 230. The actions Alex that we have taken or we're working to take I should say from the federal government. We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office. We're flagging problematic. Sorry, that's actually the wrong clip. Could you play the one says, yeah, Saki antitrust please best. The President's view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content disinformation and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections. We've seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I'm not placing any blame on any individual or group. We've seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust program. So his view is that there's more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation disinformation damaging sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public. And so there she is. That was in May 2021 of saying that, you know, we have a real problem with the kind of information they're letting flourish. It would be a shame if we took a look at Section 230 and also some antitrust action that's really at the front of our minds. Strangely, in 2022, that same pair came up after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and said that he wasn't going to be suppressing that sort of information anymore. Let's play that clip for a moment. Breaking news. Twitter agreeing to let Elon Musk purchase. Do you have a response to that? And does the White House have any concern that this new agreement might have President Trump back on the platform? Well, I'm not going to comment on a specific transaction. What I can tell you as a general matter, no matter who owns or runs Twitter, the president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms. The power they have over our everyday lives has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause. He has been a strong supporter of fundamental reforms to achieve that goal, including reforms to Section 230 and acting antitrust reforms requiring more transparency and more. And he's encouraged that there's bipartisan interest in Congress. So, clearly, it's like a reflex. Whenever we're talking about misinformation, we're going to bring up this threat of Section 230 reform and antitrust. I guess my question for you, John, is that really illegal though, or is that just kind of using the bully pulpit in a way that's First Amendment protected? Does it abridge speech? I think it does. I think that you're bringing to bear. This is worth billions. 230 is worth billions to these companies. And the fact that there's bipartisan anger over it, and I've never seen that clip of Biden just ran, that is even more explicit. Maybe it'll be in my next brief, but I think that what you have here is it's a threat to take away billions of dollars from these corporations. And to change their whole way they work. And even if you can't get Congress to go along, here you can have Republicans in those clips on 230, by the way, as well. But the administration itself can take positions. You can have the Justice Department take a position that 230 doesn't cover this or 230 doesn't cover that. That's a huge headache for these. So you don't even need to pass legislation. So it's a huge threat, as the Fifth Circuit judges were asking, nice social media company you have there, shame if anything was going to happen to it. And so I think that it is when you look at this whole of government and the whole of the threat. This is not a one-off. This is not JFK calling in the steel guys and saying steel prices are a little high, can you guys watch it or something, one dime. This is the administration contacting them every day, every week constantly. So then would your argument be then that they should just never be able to make those sort of statements that these are actually kind of illegal veiled threats? So the argument is that they, first of all, this doesn't cover Biden, right? The courts are not going to tell the president what to say or not say. So Biden would still say what he's going to say on your clips and that'll go in. But that can then be used that the agencies are doing this, that or the other thing for this reason. But yes, the fact that they're contacting these companies to tell them who to keep on and who to keep off is the problem. Not that they have their own views. You know, when we depose the CDC, I don't know what's going to come out about the census, but they got these portals into all the social media companies during the census. The census wanted to get its message out to communities that were afraid of the census coming there. So they'd say, look, we don't do this, we don't do immigration, we don't do all these things. And the social media platforms gave them these portals so that they could get their messages out onto the portals and learn how to get it higher up. That wasn't a problem. We have never heard that the Census Bureau had people take down, don't answer the door, you know. But it was then metastasized when COVID came along and this portal and this idea of, hey, we don't really know much about social media. How do we get our message out there, turn to how do we stop these people's messages? And that's the problem. When they're saying, I don't like this message, take it down. That's what the problem is. And Jay, you know, we got a backdoor look via the Twitter files at kind of how the dials are turned to turn people's engagement up and down based on what they're saying that goes against the approved message. And you were one of the specific examples of someone who was shadow banned. I mean, shadow banning was kind of considered a conspiracy theory, but you actually were suppressed according to the material that Elon Musk turned over. You know, seeing that and especially in light of what's been uncovered in discovery for this case, what's your reaction been knowing that there's been a concerted effort, you know, from the top down to really target you? I mean, I now know what it felt like for the people accused of being communists in the 1950s. Like, I mean, literally in Facebook, I was, I'm sorry, by Twitter, I was invited by Elon Musk to go see Twitter headquarters and see the database for my account. And it had the words blacklist on there. I was blacklisted. And it turns out I was blacklisted the day I joined Twitter in August 2021. Well, what would cause Twitter to decide that I was going to be blacklisted in August 2020? Before I even, I mean, from the first day, the first post, I think the first or second post I had was the Great Barrington Declaration and why I was put on a blacklist. I mean, it's absolutely stunning. And I don't think Twitter did it on their own. I mean, their interest is to get as many ideas out there as possible. Their interest isn't to like blacklist scientists. What happened here was the government abused its power, essentially forcing these companies to act to spread the propaganda of government scientists to suppress the speech of people who disagreed with them. I mean, I still am stunned that this happened in the United States. I'd never, I mean, I'm an immigrant to this country. I came when I was four. I always thought that this was the one place on earth where free speech was never going to be violated. And yet I find myself as the victim of essentially government action to suppress free speech. Actually, can I say one other thing, Zach, before I let you go back? It was really interesting watching that New York Times clip that taught with President Biden. And then it's seeing what the reporters ask Jen Psaki about these free speech violations. The newspapers have an interest in basically emasculating the social media companies who are essentially their competitors. If the social media companies are not a bastion of free speech, well, that means that you will listen more to the newspapers. That's the only place we can get information from. It's like in the Soviet Union, the government suppressed free speech. It's such a great extent that people would, you know, they would, they would listen to Providence to see what the government wanted to think. And then there were these somastop like people would send out secret messages underneath, you know, essentially trying to like get with the truth out person to person outside of the view of the government. Essentially, what the what the newspapers want like the New York Times is to kill a competitor so that these somastop can't go out. The people will get their official view and then view that as as authoritative. So what you're seeing here is like a lot of actors wanting to suppress free speech and the government absolutely using its muscle to try to destroy social media in order to get its message out in order to suppress it. The ability of outside critics to criticize it. It's entirely anti-American. I mean, I mean, I was put on a blacklist act. The word blacklist was there in the, in the, I just, I just, I thought that was something that went along in American history, not, not, not modern day times. Content modification, content modification. That's the word they use instead. It said blacklist, John. And I mean, I think your, your point is one well worth considering in just the media landscape that the, you know, big large publications are now competing with independent voices, you know, sub-stackers, podcasters and so forth. So yes, there is a real competitive, you know, playing field going on there and people need to be aware of that and raise an eyebrow. And I'm not saying everyone who's a misinformation or disinformation reporter is just, you know, sort of an attack dog for their company, but you should at least have some media literacy about this situation. That's, I think, got to be the solution to a lot of this is just improved media literacy across the board, but that's a little bit of a tangent. And I wanted to bring us home by having John respond to a few of the arguments from the opposition. This is from the oral arguments in the appeal to the injunction. August 10? Yes. And we're going to play a few of the clips. The first one is, well, it, the attorneys raising a point that I started to get into earlier, which is how do you really determine that this is involuntary compliance versus, you know, illegal government or involuntary compliance versus, you know, just the social media companies trying to improve their product. So let's play that clip from the oral arguments and have John reply. Facebook comes to the CDC and says we're trying to figure out whether these posts are true. Can you give us scientific information that would bear on that question? It would surprise me if the only way CDC would respond would be publicly rather than privately. Is it true though that that patient is sometimes low and behold vindicated as true information ideas that were labeled false or later proven true. You know, if that happens that doesn't change the fact that if social media companies are making determinations, whether we like it or not they're making determinations about what to include on their platforms and what algorithms to use to make some of it more prominent and less and the social media companies have decided and there's basically no evidence in the record that this decision was coerced by anybody. They decided that they wanted in some circumstances to have those decisions be informed by government experts views about what was true or false or what was harmful or not harmful. That doesn't mean they were turning over the reins to the government. They were asking the government for information. So there's no evidence in the record that this was coerced. They were asking for this information. What's your response? There is not one instance that I can find in the record of Facebook or any of these companies calling the government in the first instance. It's all back and forth after the government's told them what they want. And if they want information from the CDC, well, why don't they just get it the way I get it? There's not some special backdoor channel that you go to. I go look at the CDC or I call them up. So I think that if the fact pattern were that Facebook or any of these companies had called the government and say, look, there's this new thing we're seeing. Do you have any information on that? And the government said, yes, here's the information we have. I don't think that there would be a problem. Now there's a problem because of the huge amount of evidence we have that what they were doing was not just providing neutral information of what the government's view was, but saying, this is our view. Get other views off or else. The or else was behind all of it. And the idea and Mr. Tenney did a nice job there, but he didn't have all these facts. He's in the appellate level of justice. He hasn't been doing this for a year and a half. He just got involved 30 days ago. And the fact of the matter is, is that there is indeed plenty of evidence that the companies didn't want to do this. They were saying, no, Facebook would say that didn't violate, Twitter would say that didn't violate our policies. And they say, oh, no, take down RFK Junior. We want him off. He's a super spread. Well, he hasn't violated this. Alex Berenson. Well, he hasn't violated our policies off. We want him out. And they're like, I don't know. And then at some point they actually, they actually break and start doing exactly what the government wants. So, and you just, you just heard Jay, he went and looked and it said blacklist on his, on his, on his, on his Twitter file. Do you think they wanted to blacklist a renowned scientist site unseen because somebody at Twitter just didn't like him? No, the government had said these guys have bad views views, by the way, and I didn't bring this up before. Fauci used to believe the same things about respiratory viruses as Jay believes just somehow changed. There's, you know, you mentioned his, you know, the or else the implicit or else, or maybe it's explicit, I'm not sure, but it that's another issue that the government's attorney raises in these oral arguments. I want to play that clip as well. And have you answer him as to directly what the threat being leveled is. Let's play that clip. The sort of pressure that we're talking about is, you know, the government is generically going to be angry. The government might make public statements against somebody. If you look at those materials, they reflect a back and forth. Facebook sometimes is willing to do what the government wants and sometimes isn't. The way you say it is very, you know, we're going to sit down and have a meeting or we'll pass out some document. But what appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high ranking government officials that say you didn't do this yet. And that's my toning down the language. You didn't do this yet. Well, haven't you done this yet? And so it's like jump and how high there was a back and forth. Sometimes it was more friendly. Sometimes people got more testy. There were circumstances in which everyone saw eye to eye. There were circumstances in which they disagreed. If you were saying we're going to do this, you know, if you don't do this, we're going to impose some penalty, some government regulation or sanction on you. That's not the way you would go about it. You wouldn't say I'm really mad. You would just say do this or else and the or else would be clear. There was no indication in this record of what the or else is. What are they going to do? So we've talked about what some of the high level threats might have been with section 230 and antitrust. But what Tenney seems to be saying there is in all of these interactions, there was never that direct threat of like do this or this is going to happen to your company. Is that necessary for it to be illegal? It is not necessary. And he's also forgetting the carrots that there was something else that was found. So the guy who was in charge of Facebook going going back there is a former British politician. And at one point he finally says, Facebook's resisting, resisting, resisting. And then he says, when the government comes in and wants some, some, some, some message taken down, he says, listen, we've got a lot of other fish to fry with the with the administration. Why are we fighting with him about this? Like all the, he's a British guy. Well, all these Americans first First Amendment rights, right? What are we doing this for? Because we've got a lot of other things we want out of the government. And that's the other thing that I haven't mentioned. Nick Clegg is his name. And Nick Clegg had, he knows that a big multi-billion dollar company like Facebook has a lot of government interests. And those carrots of what they're asking for, for either under the administrative state, you know, they have administrative agencies they have to deal with. They didn't want to be getting crosswise for these other asses they were going to make. So we've brought up the threat, but don't forget about the carrots. All the things the government can do for a big company to make its bureaucratic costs, its administrative costs go down. That's the other thing that's in the background here. It all raises the question that I want to press you on a little bit, which is what are the limits of this argument? There's one question from a commenter that kind of gets to this point. Feximoa Zagortu says wrong. It's certainly the government's purview to look after public health and combat misinformation. Nobody's free speech was violated. Are there circumstances in which the government and a private company, private social media company can communicate? I mean, there are issues of people planning criminal activity, for instance, where you might want to have some conversations with the FBI, a back channel type thing. Are those sort of things allowed under your theory and how do you draw those bounds? They're not only allowed under my theory, they're allowed under the injunction. Judges just have to, when they issue an injunction, they just have to tell you what you can't do. Don't do this, don't do that. But here, the judge went out of his way to say all the things the government was worried that it wouldn't be able to do, and you can do this. If you want to tell them that there's a possible violation of law, go tell them that. If you want to tell them that there's been child trafficking, go tell them that. If you want to tell them that there's terrorist activity, go tell them that. Whenever you have an actual violation of law, you can go talk to them. But if nobody's free speech rights were violated, your free speech rights are violated when the government stops your message from getting out. And it's clear that happened to Alex Berenson. It's clear it happened to RFK. It's clear it happened to Jay Botticharia and anybody associated with the Great Barrington, because they may not have used his name, but they said, we want to take down the Great Barrington Declaration and everything associated with it. That wasn't done by these companies. So their First Amendment rights were taken away by the government because absent the government. You take away the hand of the government and it wouldn't have happened. That's what all the facts show. Jay, what is your reaction to, you know, because in a way you are kind of like one of the easier people to defend because a lot of what you said turned out to be right. I mean, you're wrong every now and then. But there's also a lot of people who are just insane that gather huge... On the internet? Yeah. And they gather just, you know, giant followings, spewing stuff that doesn't add up and possibly leads people down harmful paths. What is this experience? Like, how has that made you think about dealing with that issue of like the real charlatans and, you know, frauds out there? I mean, I believe... I remember meeting John Stuart Mill in college and I think he, on free speech, I think he's right. The only answer to this is more speech. I think what happens is that you have a deficit of trust in authorities when they deserve lack of trust. It's an earned lack of trust. If you want to counter people that are putting out, you know, ridiculous claims about some supplement or something, well, you have an authority in the FDA saying, look, there's no evidence behind this. And, you know, if people trust the authority, then the spread of that idea will naturally decline, not because you said you can't spread the idea, but because the idea doesn't have merit. If you want, as a government, to improve the health of the population, you don't do it by saying, this person is a bad guy, let's not let his speech go out there. What you do is by saying, look, this person is what... This is what scientific evidence is saying about what this person is saying. And put it on the web, you know, as... I mean, they have a bully pulpit with the government. It's not like the government can't get its message out. John's mentioned this multiple times. He's absolutely right. You put something on the CDC website and now all of a sudden, it's not just that the public pays attention to it, courts pay attention to it. Like, I've been involved with cases throughout the pandemic where the CDC's public pronouncements were taken as if it were gospel, right, by the courts. So I think the government's power to spread ideas is pretty substantial. What it did during the pandemic was go far beyond that to try to suppress criticism of its ideas, even when it was wrong, because it couldn't... It had to compensate for the lack of trust that the people had in the government, and it was an earned lack of trust because the government was wrong time after time after time on basic facts during the pandemic that harmed the lives of regular people. Schools closed forever, even though there was very strong scientific evidence that it wasn't going to do anything. I mean, you just have to look at Sweden. And yet, like the scientists... The government scientists swore up and down that it was necessary to keep the closed schools closed, or we have been banging the drum on masking towels. I can go on and on about the scientific misinformation the government spread. If that lack of trust that really needed to get addressed and censorship is not the way to address it. I want to press on one more point of possible disagreement with John before I ask one last question of both of you, which is one thing that has given me some pause about your lawsuit is the way that you view Section 230 that we touched on earlier and the way you view social media companies is a little bit at odds with how I view it. Some people at reason view it. You write here that in your complaint that social media platforms are akin to common carriers and or public accommodations that under long-standing statutory and common law doctrines should be subject to non-discrimination rules in accessing their platforms. In a way to summarize what I think you're saying there, it's that because they are just kind of carrying information like a phone line would that that means they should not be able to suppress, boost or otherwise, you know, make it more difficult for certain types of content to be accessed. Is that a correct summation of the viewpoint? So the NCLA doesn't have a position on Section 230 in this common carrier fight that I know is brewing. I think that that is more that what we do believe is that these social media, it is sort of a public square in that regardless of what the social media companies, because what you have there is the social media companies have their own First Amendment rights, a little different from the government. So this First Amendment overlap makes it, I'm not going to opine on that because we don't really take a position. What we do say is that to the extent that whatever's on there can't be influenced by the government because either it's a public square and they're not allowed to have message discrimination in the public square or their private companies that they can't force or Cal Joel into changing what should be on that on that platform. So it's either one or the other. They lose either way. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, you're setting up this dichotomy of like, if it is true that they are allowed to have this symbiotic relationship with government, then they need to be functioning like a public square. Otherwise the government needs to step out and not be so involved. And then you can let it unfold in the market as it sort of is now. I mean, you've got Elon Musk taking over Twitter, having his own set of norms saying we're going to let a lot of information that was not allowed to run free run free on Twitter. Now Mark Zuckerberg then steps in and starts a competitor called threads. We're like, we're going to be a little bit tougher on our moderation. And you can kind of choose between the two. To me, that's like the ideal way for that to play out. But to your point, it's hard to play out that way. If there's all this stuff happening behind the scenes. And as a legal matter, you don't know which way the court's going to go. So you set it up so that you win either way. That's what that's there for. I like that. Okay. So my final question for both of you, I'll go to you first, John. What is, let's say that you get the ruling that you want here. How does that change the world for the better? How does that change the way that social media operates? Like, how would things look different going forward post a decision in your favor? Let's say even a Supreme Court decision, let's dream big. How would things look different henceforth? So here's how it's going to look different. The media company, the social media companies themselves will know that this injunction is in place. And they, they won't be afraid of the government anymore that it can't be yelling at them every all the long day. And they'll have, they'll have the protection of this, of this injunction and know what the law is, particularly if it comes from the Supreme Court, right? So I think that when you're taking off social media after this, you'll be more confident that isn't because someone in the government has been wanting to take your message away. Now there might be a YouTube or someone else who wants to take your message away, but that's a different suit and a different problem as you point out for another day. And there's one last thing. I think that this, this, I think it's come out of the colleges. When I was a kid, everyone said sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. This idea that there's really dangerous, harmful speech, that the speech comes out and everyone's hurt. And it's not even named. They haven't even said anything about you. It's just something you don't want to hear. Well, that is a new thing in my experience. I mean, that's like the last 10, 20 years. And I don't want to hear my government, government people saying, this is harmful speech. Well, harmful speech gets hit, right? Alex Jones, you got a big judgment against him, right? They showed harm. They show him speech. He was on the internet. That, that's how you take care of it. You don't take care of it by saying it's harmful speech. Take it down and it's harmful because I don't like it. And my question for you, Jay is, you know, you've laid out a vision of it's, it's the classical liberal ideal of we have kind of an adult ongoing, sometimes messy public conversation, even under real, maybe even especially under very difficult trying circumstances like a health emergency. How optimistic are you that that is where we're headed? Do you think that there's been learning over these past years? Are you pessimistic? Do you think that it's actually going in the other direction or some mixture of the two? I mean, I think, I don't know, if you ask me one day, I'll change my mind on this from the other. At times I'm very, very optimistic and I don't see how in the long run we don't have that as the main, the enlightenment ideal is that, right? Science doesn't function outside of an environment of free speech. We have hundreds of years of history of that being a productive way to engage in science. I think a lot of people of good will see that. But on other days, I see the people that suppress speech that got so much on COVID wrong, employing essentially raw power to try to keep this regime of suppression and control in place. And it depresses me. So I don't know. I think we're at a crossroads and we as a society have to decide. And at one point in time, I thought it would just be reason that we could talk to each other and figure out which direction will go. I was pretty confident that we would win. It would just take good science to replace bad science. Now I don't know. I mean, I'm much more of the minded that it's going to take some political movement to try to reestablish free speech, which depresses me because I've always had this feeling that this idea that it would be science that would win the day rather than raw political power. I'm seeing now raw political power. I mean, I got involved in this case. I've just said I've never really been a plaintiff in a case before. It's been an eye-opening experience. But I fortunately don't see any other way other than to have this as a political fight in the political arena in order to win. And I don't know which direction is going to go. Zooming in on the science point just for a second. What is the state of kind of academic science, I guess, particularly in public health at this point? I imagine now things have gotten more contentious than ever. How has the field changed post-COVID? It feels like it's corrupted, Zach. So you have essentially a small group of very powerful scientific funders who controlled the speech of scientists during the pandemic. Never mind through the kinds of mechanisms we talked about through social media, but by essentially threats. When Francis Collins wrote that I'm a fringe epidemiologist and call for a devastating takedown, he's the main head of the NIH, National Institute of Health, $45 billion of funding that determines the career success of basically every biomedical scientist in this country. You go on the outs with the NIH and your scientific career is at threat. A lot of people, a lot of scientists stayed silent because of that threat. And a lot of people who got things very, very deeply wrong during the pandemic in science, they're essentially, they don't want people to notice that. Hence the calls for amnesty and so on. I don't see any way forward for science outside of an honest assessment of what happened. I've called for essentially a bipartisan, honest COVID commission. What will we do after, you know, after like a plane crash, right? You do an honest evaluation of what happened. The goal isn't to destroy careers of people. The goal is to do an honest assessment, say here's what we got wrong, here's what we got right, and here's how we can reform. I think science desperately needs something like that regarding the COVID pandemic. I have been surprised in the last year and some that that call for such a commission hasn't really taken root in the United States. And I hope that that eventually that we'll be able to do that. But until something like that happens, I am somewhat pessimistic about the future of science. I mean, has there been any discussion among scientists about that problem that you zeroed in on there, which is the concentration of, I think it's at $45 billion in the hands of the NIH. I mean, when you look back on, you know, Eisenhower had his famous military industrial complex speech. If you go and watch that full speech, the second part of that speech is he's also warning about what he calls the scientific industrial complex, which is kind of concentrating all the resources in this, you know, academic government like blob. And that kind of seems like that has also come true. Is there any discussions? If politics are the answer, has there been any effort to somehow decentralize the scientific funding to alleviate that problem because that seems like a more long term solution rather than hoping you get the right person in NIH or something. So I'm seeing some conversation around that on both the Democratic and Republican side, but unfortunately it's not by the central most important, but it's not Biden and Trump that I'm seeing that from. I mean, I've seen that from RFK Junior, I've seen that from DeSantis. Whether they can win the day on that is unclear to me. I don't, again, I don't think it's a purely partisan issue. I think it is a question of concentration of power and who benefits from that concentration of power. I mean, I'm in the, I'm going to try to like start advocating around that because I think it's fundamentally important for the future of science that we have this sort of decentralization of power. I don't see how any way of getting the government out of funding those kinds of, I mean, I think that it solves a real problem. Like there's a lot of science that can't be done by private in the private sector because there's, you know, a lot of science is public knowledge. You can't really patent it. So the question is how do you use that power that government has so that you would get the most out of the taxpayer dollars? I think the way you do that is by decentralizing, reducing the, you never ever put so much power over the minds and speech of scientists in the hands of one single or very small set of people. And that goes not just true for biomedical science for all of sciences. I think a lot of what we're seeing the discontent in science is that that concentrated power has essentially given scientists this message that if you don't, if you don't comply, your research career is going to go nowhere. And that is if that's the end of the enlightenment. I think whether we can reform that it's an open question but that is really I think the fundamental fight for the next for the next decades for science. I think that's a good theme to end on because, you know, trying to decentralize that power and sort of break that connection between the, you know, a very small group of people in the government and whether it's, you know, science or social media. That is that does seem to be like the task of the next decade or so. So I appreciate both of you coming to join me and talk through this case. It was really illuminating. Thanks to everyone who tuned in. As always, we will be back here Thursday, 1pm Eastern. I hope you tune in and we'll see you next week.