 When does social media government collaboration cross the line from voluntary information sharing into illegal censorship? That's the question at the center of Missouri v. Biden, a case that's made its way to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And it was the subject of a recent live stream with attorney John Vecchioni and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, who's a plaintiff in the case. My primary goal in this case is to restore free speech so that science can actually function again. Bhattacharya was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration. In October 2020, open letter calling for an end to COVID-19 lockdowns and advocating instead for a strategy called focused protection of the elderly and vulnerable. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed NIH director Francis Collins emailed Anthony Fauci, calling for a quick and devastating takedown of the letter. Fauci blasted the proposal as nonsense in multiple media interviews, though denied in a taped deposition that he'd coordinated statements with Collins or that he had anything to do with the social media suppression of Bhattacharya and his colleagues that was later revealed via the Twitter files. So your statement was made within two days of Dr. Collins' 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 gonna 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. At the same timeframe, did you become aware that the Great Barrington Declaration was being censored in social media? I'm not aware of any censorship of anything. Dr. Fauci, rather than trying to grapple with the actual critique we had, essentially organized a propaganda campaign. Countering the Great Barrington Declaration with coordinated statements to the media that strawman the details of the proposal might be unethical, but it is legal. The question at the center of this case is whether the resulting suppression of COVID policy dissenters like Bhattacharya was voluntary private action or illegal government coercion. Take this March 2021 roundtable organized by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. YouTube removed it because of the views Bhattacharya and others expressed about masking children in school. How do you teach a child to read with face masks on Zoom? 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. When YouTube suppressed that video of a sitting governor talking to his scientific advisors in public so that the public can understand the scientific basis for which he's making decisions, I was stunned. I mean, I thought like good government groups should be fair to that. Even if you disagree with what I said, at least you wanna know what the good advice the governor is getting, right? When Elon Musk released the Twitter files to journalists, we learned that Bhattacharya had been blacklisted, which means the reach of his posts was suppressed. We also learned that Twitter executives were in constant communication with federal law enforcement about problematic posts and users. Discovery in this court case revealed a similar back channel between the CDC, Facebook and YouTube as reported on by reasons Robbie Suave. I think everyone who got into this thought, well, Silicon Valley, they probably wanna keep certain views out because they're all a monoculture 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 kinda stunned that Facebook was pushing back. They were all pushing back. 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 wanna do this. We'd be doing this without this pressure, without these calls and these threats. The plaintiffs argue that the government strong armed big tech into doing its bidding with the constant threat to impose anti-trust regulation and revoke section 230 protections, which shield website owners from liability for user-generated posts. Both Biden and his press secretary, Jen Psaki, repeatedly invoked this threat in public. I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he's a real problem. Section 230 should be revoked. 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. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. Accuses social media companies of killing people for allowing vaccine myths to circulate online. The world's people. The president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms, what 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 anti-trust reforms. 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. But in oral arguments, the government's attorney said that the social media companies voluntarily sought help from the government during the pandemic and 2020 election and that the prosecution has no proof of a direct threat. If you were saying we're gonna do this, if you don't do this, we're gonna 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. Your free speech rights are violated when the government stops your message from getting out. It's clear it happened to Jay Bhattacharya and anybody associated with the Great Barrington because they may not have used his name but they said we wanna 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. In July, a district court judge ordered the federal government to seize all communication with social media companies having to do with takedowns until the case was heard. But that injunction was reversed after the government appealed to the US Fifth Circuit Court. Bhattacharya says that regardless of what happens in this case, an organized political movement is what's needed to restore free speech and open scientific inquiry in America. I've always had this feeling that this idea that it would be science that would win the day rather than brought political power. I unfortunately 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. Missouri v. Biden may help determine the future of free speech in America and by focusing their sights on government actors rather than the private companies under their boot, the plaintiffs have chosen exactly the right targets. 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. They're acting in this way because they don't know how else to regain the trust. Hey, that video was based on a longer conversation that I had with Jay Bhattacharya and John Becchioni about the Missouri v. Biden case. You can see that full conversation right here or a clip from that conversation right over here.