 Now for the main event, again, the resolution reads the making of national internet policy was hindered rather than helped by the July 4th federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms. Here for the affirmative, Kate Klonic. Kate, please come to the stage. Speaking for the negative, Jay Badasharia, Jay, please come to the stage. Grant, please close the voting. Professor Kate Klonic, you have 17 and a half minutes to defend the resolution. Take it away, Kate. Thank you so much for having me here today. It's an honor to be invited to debate Dr. Badasharia on this resolution and to take the side of the affirmative. I want to begin my remarks today by first setting the factual stage for the case that we're discussing and the ruling that prompted this debate, Missouri v. Biden, which came out on July 4th of this year. I will argue that in its overbroad opinion, this case first harms national internet policy by misunderstanding the pluralistic system of governance, not government, that have developed to help private social media companies maximize freedom of expression. While also balancing countervailing concerns for public safety and public health. Second, I will argue that the courts are not the correct institutional avenue to set what is effectively not just national but global governance on online private speech platforms and their policies. And thus, both the substance of this opinion and the institution that generated it have hindered the creation of national internet policy and in doing so ultimately jeopardized freedom of expression. With that overview, let me just start with a brief procedural history of this case. The Missouri v. Biden ruling was a 155-page opinion on a preliminary injunction issued by Judge Terry Dowdy, a federal trial court judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. The case was brought by two Republican state attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana and five private individuals, including my opponent here today. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants, President Biden and various members of his administration through public pressure campaigns, private meetings and other forms of direct communication around disinformation, misinformation and malinformation colluded with and or coerced social media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content on social media platforms. And that suppression constituted government action and therefore was a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. Specifically, the facts in the case include episodes in which members of the Biden administration sent frenetic, sometimes even profanity-laced messages to employees of social media companies asking or even demanding that the platforms remove doubtful claims about COVID-19 and the 2020 election. It's important to note that I actually agree with Judge Dowdy that the apparent pressure that the Biden administration places on platforms is certainly questionable. These incidents seem like they could potentially be classic examples of what political scientists call job-owning, the government's use of public appeals or private channels to induce change or compliance from businesses. But the degree to which these demands are heated or coercive is still very much uncertain. The rule was uncertain in a preliminary injunction motion and in issuing an over-rod preliminary injunction, the ruling not only sets back the development of national internet policy, it harms freedom of expression and the creation of well-managed and governed private online speech environments. So let me explain with an example of where the lack of clarity around job-owning and an overreaction to it might play out. Under existing First Amendment doctrine, most notably phantom books, it is clear it is far from clear where the line should be drawn between government participation in useful conversations on public policy and when that tips into state-ordered coercion. This is particularly true in the new world of private individual speech organized, distributed, and hosted by private platforms. For example, hypothetically, the White House emailing the head of the Trust and Safety in Twitter and saying, if you don't take down pro-anorexia content, responding by, we will respond by issuing an executive order against you. And then Twitter, accordingly, responds to the process to ban all pro-anorexia content. That would be a clear instance of job-owning and an unconstitutional government censorship. But it is not clear what might happen if Twitter in seeking to be more accountable to its users and more responsive to their concerns over teen mental health and eating disorders, asks the CDC to be among a set of stakeholders that meets with Twitter's public policy team in order to determine best practices on pro-anorexia content. This latter example, multi-stakeholderism and expert input, which might sometimes include parts of government, is how much of the internet policy on major online speech platforms is currently being set. And it's something those of us who work in online speech and who care about freedom of expression have long fought for. Accountability of these major online speech platforms to its users, both directly and indirectly. Because it is something that the public has long demanded and it's something that is best not left to the hands of government, specifically for First Amendment reasons. And so the power and influence of big speech platforms has undoubtedly increased over time, and it's fundamentally altered the freedom of expression. And let me explain a little bit by backing up and saying what I mean by that. This new model for free expression is what Yale law professor, Jack Bulkin, calls the free speech triangle. For most of modern history, the story of speech governance concerns just two parties, citizens and the state. The ever present danger of this dyadic model is that the mass of power, the boot of the state is on the neck of citizens. In their defense, citizens have things like voting, speech, protest, democratic mechanisms, and they're constitutionally guaranteed in the United States with provisions like the First Amendment to help resist government censorship. But they're still reliant for much of their speech on gatekeepers, publishers in the press to amplify their message and reach a large audience. That is something that we also enshrine in the First Amendment, their own right to do that. This might have been the struggle forever, but the internet changed this dynamic in huge ways by allowing individual citizens to route around the potential or actual censorship put in place by states, and also to amplify their message directly and step out of the role of gatekeepers. I'm being, I'm like, okay. I want those minutes, but back in the clock. Yeah, I know. Now there were only, anyways, this might have been the struggle forever, but the internet changed the dynamic by both allowing individual citizens to route around any censorship put in place by the states, but to amplify their message directly. We all kind of know this techno utopianism that the internet brought us. Now there were three players, not just governments and citizens, but online speech platforms. And of course we have seen that the internet and private speech platforms while opening incredible new avenues of access to information, self-expression, democracy has also led to an increase in, because these are fairly, these are neutral platforms, harassment, defamation, pornography, tide pod challenges, bullying, more sharing of child sexual abuse material, spam, fraud, terrorism recruitment, the list goes on. Contrary to those that call for a so-called absolute free speech environment, either design, discussion, or democracy, first amendment theory has always allowed and in fact required rules and architecture in order to preserve a functioning speech environment. Be that time, place, manner restrictions, or on protests, or bands and megaphones and parks, ideal environments for free expression require rules, accountability, and norms to function properly. But what those rules should be and who should set them in these new speech environments online is a near impossible question when the powers were just governments and citizens and it is even more difficult to discern in the context of online speech platforms which themselves have their own first amendment right to seek guidance on what speech they decide to host on their platforms and which includes, if they so choose, deciding to tether their private speech policies to input received from the government. So let's bring this back to the case at hand. For many of the misinformation policies around COVID and the pandemic, the platform's decision to ask the CDC for guidance was the choice of the platform. During a time of much confusion in the midst of pandemic, private social media platforms independently created and enforced speech policies and content moderation policies around COVID-19 and tried to inform these decisions during a very uninformed period through guidance from government agencies like the CDC. This was not only their right under the first amendment, it is unclear why that it was exactly a pragmatically poor decision. What other authority should speech platforms reach out to in order to moderate and curate their speech policies in the midst of a global public health crisis? But Judge Dowdy's ruling on July 4th, which sided with the plaintiffs and issued a preliminary injunction, was frighteningly overbroad, seemed to prevent anyone in the Biden administration from having any kind of communication with online platforms about matters related to speech. It seemed that platforms and governments were so constricted under this preliminary injunction that it was unclear if their platforms would speak at all to any government agency or official for any reason about things that were posted online. This includes preparing governments for election interference, national security issues, there were some carve-outs that seemed like they might actually be themselves go against First Amendment doctrine that we had specifically said the government is not allowed to reach out to, criminal issues and other types of national security issues. Other policy issues that the public was clamoring for improvement on, from teen mental health and suicide to eating disorders or life-threatening social media challenges, all of that were even less likely to have justification for expert agency import on reform. But as I wrote in an op-ed at the time, the ruling was more than a muddled set of instructions for communication between government and tech platform, which is an urgent issue for those concerned with misinformation of the approach to the 2024 presidential election. It is also a bellwether of disconcerting new political tactic, one that you state and local authorities, along with federal forum and judge shopping, to make national internet policy. After years of failed attempts by Congress to regulate major social media platforms, not clear whether the regulation would have been upheld under the First Amendment, but regulation that for nearly a decade, Americans of all political stripes have been saying that they want, the state authorities are rushing in to capitalize on an unmet political demand. Other examples include laws passed in Florida and Texas that prohibit larger social media platforms from removing posts based on the opinions they express in the ban on TikTok that Montana has passed. I think Virginia has recently passed a number of bills that was Utah. Going local has strategic, if sometimes, unethical advantages. It is no accident that this case arose in Louisiana. In this case, Judge Dowdy, a Donald Trump appointee, was at the time the only judge who heard cases filed in the Monroe Division of the Western District of the state by choosing their venue, where the plaintiffs in effect got to choose their judge. And similarly, it is no accident that the same Monroe Division, and with Judge Dowdy presiding again, is also the venue for a pending civil suit that a host of private actors loosely connected to the case against the Biden Administration of conspiracy to engage in mass surveillance and censorship. Appeals in both cases will be heard and then have been heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has been sympathetic to state attempts to regulate big tech. But issues of mis and disinformation in public health are issues of public safety and public concern. And there are also issues that the public demands be addressed by the private platforms. And that's why it's a shame that factionalized state politics and forum shopping is going to possibly determine the resolution. So what would be a better alternative? How do you regulate a public right like freedom of expression when that right is intermediated by private companies? What role, if any, pen or should the government play? Well, more guidance from the courts would be welcome in where to draw the line for the purposes of job-warning and defining coercion. National preliminary injunctions from forum shop judges are not the right way in the long term to solve the much thornier public-private pluralism questions that continue to make governance of online speech platform the center of not just national interest, but global concern. Internet speech has specific features in both technical design and economic feasibility and normative outcome that make it particularly hard to make rules for. And in terms of legal rights, they demand a delicate balance preserving their own First Amendment rights and the First Amendment rights of their users. Large online speech platforms connect the world and the world's information and conversations into so-called town squares or even front-room parlors operating trans-nationally, connecting people and ideas that meet your respective of national or political boundaries. And this is where the problem gets difficult. Despite these online intermediaries all being private entities, we see them as governing a fundamental human right, a public right of freedom of expression. And that is something that demands governance, but not government, in order to preserve, organize, curate, and encourage. Developing a national indeed global internet policy that does that requires a more sophisticated and pluralistic model than you will ever get from one judge in Louisiana. Thank you. I look forward to the rest of the debate. Thank you, Kate. Sorry that my stupid machine acted up. I take it you got compensated. Jay, for the negative 17 and a half minutes, take it away, Jay. Thanks, everybody. So when I was 19 I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it by heart. The American civic religion has free speech at the core of its liturgy. I never imagined there would come a time when the American government would think that violating this right would be just the normal thing to do or that I personally would become the target of it. Unfortunately, that did become true during the pandemic, both things. My family immigrated from India when I was four, but my parents would often talk about Indian politics. They were the children of violent partition of India and Pakistan in Bangladesh. Both my parents had grown up in poverty, my mom and a kakata slump. They knew firsthand how authoritarian governments hurt the poor. I remember in 1975 a high court found that then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had interfered unlawfully in an election. The ruling disqualified her from holding office. In response, she declared a state of emergency, suspended Indian democracy, censored the opposition, the press and government critics, and threw her political opponents in jail. I remember the shock of these events and our family's collective relief that we were in the United States where such events could never happen. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the American government violated my own free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues in the crime of questioning government policy regarding COVID. My parents had taught me that the people here could criticize the government even over matters of life and death without worry of censorship because of the American commitment to free speech. But over the past four years, I have been robbed of that illusion. American government officials working in concert with big tech companies, coercing them, pushing them, forcing them, often threatening them to have attacked and suppressed me and my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies. Criticism that's proven prescient and had it been heeded would have resulted in much fewer harms to American school children, to the American poor and to the American working class, and would have resulted in better COVID outcomes. In the mid-15th century, the invention of the Gutenberg press vastly decreased the cost of access to ideas. Governments and ecclesiastical authorities reacted to the challenge posed by the uncontrolled spread of these ideas by pointing the danger of books and pamphlets spreading dissent, heresy, and rebellion. Arguing that unregulated ideas like the heliocentric universe or that the king is a tyrant would harm the public vulnerable to dangerous ideas, both secular authorities and the church brutally censored the press on pain of excommunication or death. The invention of the internet and social media poses a challenge to authorities similar to the Gutenberg press. As the printing press did, those technologies sharply decreased the cost for regular people to reach vast audiences with their ideas and with no filter imposed by media companies or governments. They empowered people to organize enormous social and political movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2009, Brexit in 2015, and the upset election of Donald Trump in 2016. Whatever one's opinions of those events, these populist movements would have been unimaginable to organize what activists using social media to reach mass audiences. In response to the evident influence the social media gives to the masses, authorities today did exactly what those ecclesiastical and government authorities did during the invention of the Gutenberg press. They censored people now on social media whose ideas posed a threat to those in policy or those people in power. Western governments have developed a vast censorship apparatus designed to block offending ideas and speech on social media and to defame political opponents as dangerous heretics, perhaps working under the undue influence of foreign actors spreading mis, dis, and malinformation to the unsuspecting masses. Even in the U.S., which is supposed to have a functioning First Amendment, the Federal Judge in the Missouri versus Biden case found that the Biden administration had constructed an Orwellian ministry of truth, his words, not mine, devoted to censoring Americans. The Federal Appeals Judges, which heard the case, three of them signed on to that raising, calling it essentially a censorship industrial complex in the United States imposed by the government itself on social media and on users, on regular Americans. A silicon wall of censorship is coming down all around the once free world. Laws such as the EU's Digital Service Act, the UK's online safety bill, Canada's bill C-11, an Australian bill in draft to combat misinformation, disinformation, all provide Western governments the power, the arbitrary censor, which they've used to suppress the speech of opposition political parties. They've used to suppress scientific ideas that contradict government edicts and even religious worship. The analogy with the Gutenberg press goes further, except in the modern age, government scientific bureaucracies have replaced the medieval church in their power to excommunicate heretics from public life. Tony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy Impact Disease, exemplifies his hubris. In an interview with the cable TV host in 2021, he put forward a modern version of the papal infallibility. He said, if you are trying to get me as a public health official and a scientist, you're really attacking not only Dr. Tony Fauci, you're attacking science. Proponents of these censorship powers inevitably cite the harm from people being exposed to untruths or even foreign propaganda. They make the wrong medical decisions, they lose trust in social institutions or vote for the wrong people hearing this misinformation, they argue. Underlying this worry is the dubious and dangerous proposition that people are too naive and stupid to distinguish true from false at scale. We've come a long way from the 1990s when liberal governments trusted the wisdom of crowds to a situation where the elites fear and distrust the public they anomally govern. In this new era of censorship, 19th century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill's logic that the public correction of incorrect ideas improves knowledge and wisdom of the public is now replaced with the towering knowledge of gurus like Tony Fauci. The problem is that government and the entities are bad at identifying misinformation and they have a propensity to censor people ideas that are critical of government policy whether or not those criticisms of their policies are correct. Take for instance the censorship of COVID science on masks, lockdowns, immunity, vaccines, online scientific discussions to protect a narrative aimed at manipulating the public's behavior often at the expense of the truth and if you read the discovery in the Missouri vs. Biden case you'll see this reckless disregard for the truth of scientific propositions in the censorship demands. All that mattered was that critics were criticizing government policy. Though scientists and people vehemently disagreed about the wisdom of lockdown, school closures, vaccine mandates and discrimination, masks and so much else, there's near universal agreement that what we did absolutely failed and what I want to tell you is that the primary reason that the United States failed so badly to manage COVID was that the government itself was a primary source of misinformation. It's not, it's the pandemic response brought tremendous collateral harm. There's now broad agreement for instance that the school closures in some states running for almost a year and a half, my own kids stayed out of school or locked out of school houses for almost a year and a half have set kids behind in ways that would lead them to worse outcomes of adults including shorter poorer lives. We have accelerated inequality into the next generation with our pandemic policies and at the time the government was criticized about it but worked very hard to censor critics. One, the losses are unequally distributed with poor and minority kids suffering the worst learning losses. Worldwide kids never return when schools finally opened. Maybe the most perplexing sin of public health establishment was it abandoned and essential commitment to science. For instance why did public health authorities ignore clear scientific data that COVID infection acquired immunity is as strong as or stronger than vaccine acquired immunity. On the contrary the government censored scientists ordered social media companies to censor scientists like Harvard University epidemiologist Martin who pointed to scientific evidence in peer-reviewed public published papers of this truth of that COVID acquired immunity was actually quite strong. Vaccine mandates forced many front-line workers heroes who contracted COVID early in the pandemic while doing essential work to choose between their careers and a vaccine that provides less protection for the people who were already recovered from COVID than it does for the people who were COVID naive. University presidents forced young male college students including those with excellent immunity from prior COVID infection to accept an elevated risk of myocarditis again documented in the peer review literature as a price for college education and critics of those policies online were censored at the order of the Biden administration. Many faced with these anti-scientific choices will never again trust public health authorities even on vital topics such as the necessity of traditional childhood vaccines. Public health bureaucrats and government officials operate more like dictators than scientists during the pandemic sealing themselves off from credible outside criticism consider for instance the treatment of scientific dissidents outside the government who dared to contradict public health dogma. In the early days of the pandemic high public health bureaucrats organized to cover up the hypothesis that COVID emerged as a result of a laboratory leak calling scientists to propose the idea of conspiracy theorists only recently have official bodies start to admit the hypothesis is plausible and very likely true and certainly not a conspiracy where do the scientists whose careers were destroyed by advancing the idea of the correct idea go to get the reputations back. The scientific bureaucrats use the power of government to tell social media companies that those scientists that were saying absolutely true facts trying to start a conversation that the government needed to have were conspiracy theorists. When Martin Cooldover of Harvard University Sinatra Gupta of Oxford University and I from Stanford proposed a focus protection alternative to the lockdowns called the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020 then NIH director Francis Collins labeled us fringe epidemiologists which I have a business card if I don't know if I brought it with me. They then engaged tens of thousands of doctors signed this fringe proposition but the government engaged in a media takedown organized by Francis Collins and Tony Fauci under the banner of combating misinformation they used their power to collaborate with social media to control the public and to protect the public from COVID. I told the governor that in March 2021 Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Coolder, Dr. Gupta and I participated in a two hour round table with the sitting governor of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. During the discussion the participants including me were asked about the efficacy of child masking and I can tell you to this day there's not one single randomized study even conducted and I told the governor that and in response YouTube took down the video of me telling the sitting governor of a state that there was no such evidence. When Elon when Elon Musk Twitter he opened the doors of the company independent journalists like Barry Weiss when she looked at the Twitter database she found that Twitter had placed me on a trends black list a word that I thought we put in the United States in the 1950s and when I went to Twitter headquarters and I looked at the Twitter database it turns out that I was placed on that black list on August 2021 the day I joined Twitter for the crime of posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration. The impetus behind my being placed on the black list wasn't voluntary behavior by Twitter it was a direct request by government officials that my speech only reached a narrow group of people and not the public at large. The pattern repeated itself throughout the pandemic with scientific bureaucrats abusing their authority to create an illusion of scientific consensus in favor of their destructive ideas where none existed. The censorship of government a scientific discussion permitted a policy environment where clear scientific truths were muddled and as a result destructive and ineffective policies persisted much longer and they otherwise would have and what I will tell you is that had there been an honest and open scientific debate without the government's use of its power to censor we would have won the fight over school closures. Schools would have opened much earlier just as they did in much of Europe. According to the court documents found in the Reservoirs of Biden case where I am a plaintiff the Biden administration insisted on censoring and boosting content that accurately pointed out the rapidly waning of COVID vaccine against infection which they used to justify executive orders like imposing vaccine mandates. The Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor vaccine discussions such as groups of vaccine injured patients who were talking with each other trying to get themselves comfort and figure out ways to manage the myocarditis that their young sons and daughters had. Facebook responded that these groups did not violate their community standards and yet the Biden administration insisted that it get taken down. In response to harsh communications of the Biden administration it wasn't simply jaw boning. Facebook limited the reach of these groups and censored them. The evidentiary record in the case includes an eight hour deposition of Tony Fauci telling the court that he does not recall answers to basic scientific and factual questions 180 times almost is shocking and reading in full. The irony is that the government itself was the primary source of government as I've said. So how did the government accomplish this feat of censorship? Despite the protections of free speech they did it in two steps. First they laundered the development of a particular agenda for censorship lists of who and what to censor through government funded third parties that are themselves not prohibited from such activities in the guise of funding research. Government agencies like funded NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory and other projects like the Verality Project or Center for Countering Digital Hate to create a target list for censorship. The organizations received then tips from public and government stakeholders essentially laundering the government request to take down information to construct their hit list and then selling those to the social media companies if they were not government whereas in fact it was the government asking for the censorship. Second with government agencies private entities linked to prominent universities like Stanford worked with corporate teams and social media companies trust and safety decisions divisions to pressure social media companies to censor offending speech often using AI algorithms to identify the speech marked for censorship at scale. Governments are directly involved in this step meeting regularly with social media companies to reinforce the censorship demands telling them that if you do not comply then we will the nasty things will happen to you. Second with government agencies it is a very evidentiary record not Terry Dowdy made an analogy to Al Capone going to business saying that is a nice business you have there would be terrible if something were to happen to it. Ironically given my opponents contention the government itself was harmed by the censorship efforts in April of 2021 the CDC issued a warning about the J&J vaccine based on a signal that the government then was tagged as an anti-vax group for sharing with the CDC's road. As things stand the situation in free speech is dire in the western world and the Missouri vs. Biden case is our best current defense against it. Thank you. Kate you get an extra 15 seconds for your rebuttal. Seven and a half minutes plus 15 seconds for you. I just the one thing I wanted to point out was that this case and in particular was not a move forward for a national internet policy and I stand by that. For one my opponent brings up the fact that the government did all of the censorship but I would point out that the government that he ended up launching his suit against and that is being targeted in this the Biden administration that for most Trump administration. It was from 2019 to 2020 the action that he claims happened on behalf of the government was actually the Trump administration government in October of 2020 is the alleged time in which Google reboosted the search results for the great Barrington declaration in October of 2020 Trump was president. There is a number of points here that are just like the timelines just don't match up there is no level in which the the great Barrington declaration was while D-Trendon on Twitter was censored or outright banned in any capacity except for this one YouTube video in March 18th of 2021 that was taken off of YouTube. The other thing that I kind of just want to bring up here is to remind ourselves not to be talking about global and national internet policy that when we're talking about national internet policy it is really important I believe not to tip into overstatement about what is actually being censored and when we make comparisons to ideas of authoritarian dictatorships and being Gandhi being thrown in jail for stepping out against things there was no one thrown in jail in the United States I know for not you you were not even thrown in Twitter jail there was your account was remained up the entire time that you were on Twitter your account has 400,000 followers which if they are voting in this debate I am almost certainly going to lose like people still saw your posts and the idea that you were blacklisted on Twitter trends merely means that this little tiny thing on the side of Twitter decides not to surface your posts there is no right you have no right either through Twitter's own decision Facebook's own decision any of these platform's decision to access that they can decide how they want to curate their platform that is as legitimate a First Amendment value as yours and the idea that you were blacklisted from a trend while still being allowed to speak on your platform and to build a following of 400,000 people for free on these platforms is I think a pretty remarkable statement to the absolute reach that your speech had and the idea that you were anything but censored so from a very legal perspective here I would challenge your standing I would challenge your standing that you have like you have standing against this particular administration versus the other administration some of the facts that you had this idea that there is there are a lot of kind of glossed statements that's near universal agreement now that there would have been a better income of COVID had there not been lockdowns I have not seen evidence of that no more than you claim to have seen evidence of any type of scientific study on the effectiveness of masks or the effectiveness of vaccines and so I just kind of want to go back to the idea that just because while I am sorry you have felt that there is this campaign against you and your ideas I do not think that that rises to this level in which we decide that we are going to writ large change national and because the United States is the the manufacturer of these global internet speech platforms that we're going to change global internet policy because you're big mad at Fauci is kind of the idea that there is that this is like a ridiculous kind of notion that really I think takes a real step backwards in the promise that we have for a functioning and very very effective form of governance and the reach of a new platform and a new series of technologies that are wonderful for freedom of expression and that overall have led to an increase in science, an increase in education an increase in voice and freedom of expression and I just I will leave it there Seven and a half minutes for you Jay So a few points so first I wanted to respond to some of the things that Kate said during her opening statements she mentioned repeatedly that this is a matter of good governance but we want to make sure that for instance that national security is not violated on the internet that your secrets are not violated and I mentioned child porn but I would agree with that we want to make sure that child porn is not put on the internet that there are criminal violent threats not put on the internet I want to make clear that the judge in the July 4th ruling explicitly had exceptions allowing the government to talk with and tell the social media companies explicitly about those problems there was no suppression in the the the appeals court that looked at it agreed and in fact what they did is they simplified the ruling so that it only focused on legal speech just as the Missouri vs. Biden did so that the Biden administration couldn't go and tell them to suppress my speech in the way they actually did second Kate has painted a picture of voluntary suppression of expression as if the twitter is just next door and we want to make sure that you only have a few more people in your neighbors this is a as far from reality as you can imagine and if you don't agree with me what I recommend is you please go read the evidentiary record in the Missouri vs. Biden case it is an absolutely shocking overreach where the internet platforms themselves are saying look this is this is insane now a lot of it you'll see there's like this kind of Stockholm syndrome they're shocked that this is happening we can get out from being the threats in fact in congressional hearings what was found that Facebook was really so scared in internal discussions internal emails Facebook was scared of the Biden administration essentially taking away basic regulatory authority in ways that would harm the company destroy the company that they complied this was not a voluntary effort this was a coerced effort by the Biden administration to suppress speech third this claim about judge shopping is amazing to me I mean that's a standard claim that people make on both the left and the right what I will just say is that the judge himself was 98 to 0 approved by the senate that the three judges on the fifth circuit approved it and the fact that the supreme court has granted cert to the case which is something that only rarely do judge shopping shows the importance of the case and shows that this is not simply judge shopping that in fact this is an that every judge that has looked at this case has said that is among the most important first amendment cases in the history of this country just before I leave the judge shopping attack I will just say that this is a form of an ad hominem attack right it's not actually a logical attack on the on the factual base of the case and the case says that that trump did it too you know I agree with that trump did it too I am not a political actor I care about public health I care about American free speech rights I care about science and I think that the government should have absolutely no role playing the kind of policemen it did it started in the trump administration and the by the administration expanded and they were both wrong in doing it and I am going to compromise the kind of suppression that I faced I will tell you as a result of the kind of devastating takedown induced by the by Francis Collins and Tony Fauci I was a result of death I had death threats against me I had attacks against me it was a tremendously stressful time in order to just do my basic job which is to tell the public about scientific results the way that I see them and engage in scientific debates and I will tell you that every single one of my colleagues who are on the other side of the the by the administration and the COVID policies felt exactly the same way there is a claim that I was not allowed to have my voice I was put on a blacklist what that meant was that only people who followed me could hear my voice the purpose of the platform if it was a neutral platform would have been to let anyone hear my voice with the normal rules the blacklist was not I was not placed on the blacklist because Twitter had some policy to put Jay Bhattachary on a blacklist I was placed on a blacklist because the government asked Twitter to do it now as far as the standing my standing in the case I just asked you to read the evidence record it wasn't just one YouTube suppressed it was a systematic effort by the government to suppress scientific discussion on COVID and I have standing as do many many other groups I will just finish with the last note about whether we would have won the fight on lockdowns and school closures the claim I made in my opening statement was that there is pretty much universal acknowledgement that the school closures were a tremendous mistake even the New York Times has admitted as much I think that that is absolutely true I say that a tremendous number of people now agree that the lockdowns were a mistake if you look at the Swedish response to the lockdowns they have lower all-cause access deaths than all of the rest of Europe California has higher all-cause access that since the start of the pandemic in Florida there is no good evidence to say the lockdowns did much of anything the consensus on lockdowns is coming and it would have been here much earlier had there been free expression finally the Kate emphasizes this idea that we are stepping backwards in our ability to have governance and by governance what she means I think is that some sort of detente between governments and these platforms so that the platforms can set the rules that they want for speech and the governments can be happy with them and there is this sort of happy suppression with everyone is happy with the suppression that is happening that is how I read Kate's characterization of it in fact this is an Orwellian telling of the actual factual record the actual factual record does not show a voluntary governance of speech where the companies are competing with each other in some paradise to try to keep speech as open as possible which the factual record shows is that the governments work to suppress the speech of regular people using the leverage they had of the financial well-being of these platforms in order to suppress the speech of regular people this is not simply just companies fighting competing with each other to find a congenial way I am completely in favor of companies having an uninterfered capacity to say what kind of speech belongs or does not belong on their platforms that is not the contention in the Missouri vs. Biden case the contention of the Missouri vs. Biden case is quite the opposite that the Biden administration and other administrations should abide by the first amendment and that primarily is it thank you thank you to you both we now go to the Q&A portion of the evening and you are invited to line up to ask whatever questions you would like also both debaters will be welcome to ask each other questions whenever they would like therefore my first question to either of you Kate do you want to wait for the questions of the audience or would you like to ask Jay a question Jay do you want to ask Kate a question okay they waive the right at this point but you can apply the right if you would like to as the Q&A proceeds I see a lot of bright faces in front of the mics there please ask your question as a question I think I recognize you as somebody I went to high school with so this is a question primarily for Jay and basically I think it's very easy to agree with you that the government ought not to interfere when the government is supporting a position that's wrong or when the government is supporting a position that's arguable but what about when the government is interfering with the expression with the free expression of a falsehood that is constitutionally protected let's say the claim that COVID vaccines have chips in them that Bill Gates put in now that's a false claim it's at least arguably a harmful claim but it's a constitutionally protected claim are you against the government suggesting to platforms that they probably shouldn't give a lot of attention to that claim I mean I think that the so to answer your question I don't think the government should suppress that speech I think the government should counter that speech and the way the government counters that speech is by building institutions within the government that can in a trustworthy way say no no there are no chips in these vaccines by the way there are no chips in these vaccines the problem with the way the government behaved suppressing even true speech even just a regular scientific debate it undermined the public trust in these institutions like the CDC like the US Surgeon General's office and as a result the government lost the ability to effectively counter misinformation like that there is more speech and I think that's my I mean I think that's the right thing if the government is telling the honest truth is best they know how and they build up trust with the public as a result of it there's not going to be a big problem with this information people will say wrong things all the time but that's not the problem the problem is the inability to counter it with trustworthy sources free speech allows that the kind of suppression of speech we had basically undermines the capacity of the public I think that's a good question I just want to point out that you just said that the government should build an institution that can measure these types of things and that is literally like kind of one of the things that the CDC is in charge of doing and so the fact that this is something the kind of the fact that this was something that was happening and the government was putting this forward and also that one of the recommendations in the giant record that you make mention of in the in the Missouri v. Biden case they would put counter-speech up they would put they would allow something like the chips and vaccines type of thing to go up and then they would put a label on it that said something effectively like this has been disputed by so and so and we're not sure if this is accurate information and that was also called censorship and so that is something that I think that what you just said is something that you've said the opposite for like and that people who have supported and said that these claims are censorship is not I mean this can't all be censorship everything that is like happening can't all be censorship and it can't be having speech and counter-speech for the government can't both be Kate they banned vaccine injured groups from talking to each other at the request of the government who is that they being the Biden administration forced the Facebook to do that absolutely in the records of the Missouri versus Biden case not only that I'd say the way that they in the hand-handed way they forced the social media companies to tag like false information actually I think spread further distrust right so they put go see what the CDC is saying on absolutely true things so essentially saying look this what this regular Joe is saying on online is wrong it was just a link to a peer review paper and they put it on on these on these like you know vaccines car are microchipped I think it was an absolute the way that the government regulated speech online censored speech online absolutely fuel the distrust of a significant fraction of public about the vaccines it was an absolute disaster for public health communication but you just said the counter-speech was the way to solve the problem of allowing first amendment protected speech that was wrong to stay up I didn't say that this was counter-speech I'm saying that what they did was censoring I'm saying that what they if they wanted to build what was censoring the labels that you say are counter-speech are now also censorship no what was what was no I didn't say that you said that what I said was that the Biden administration's demand to put the labels on the censorship it was even when they were saying correct things whether true or false those labels went up the Biden administration's demands to put the counter-speech isn't I get to I get to be there as the government right in front of you every time you say something that's not counter-speech counter-speech is that you have a CDC that says we've done scientific study here's the here's the thing and they buy they buy advertising on the platform they have public PSAs they there are other mechanisms other than intruding on on how the social media companies present and regulate the speech that they have what what they did was absolutely censorship they prevented vaccine injured people from talking to each other they forced Facebook to take down speech of vaccine injured people what do you think was going to happen to them they're not going to start trusting the government on this as much as Kate next question yeah this question is for Kate do you not see the failure of threads Zuckerberg's known that misinformation version of Twitter that dropped from 100 million users less than 10 and the broad almost universal rejection of Nina Jankoix and her disinformation governance board as a clear democratic repudiation of your position I do I not see it no I don't see it as that I can you can you explain a little bit more what you're what you're asking me about yeah so like you're saying threads as it the fact that threads exist repudiates my yeah the failure of threads which promise to censor more than Twitter and it's dropping from 100 million users on the first days of its release to 10 now a couple months after its release and the rejection of Nina Jankoix global disinformation board the promise to what global disinformation board the Biden disinformation governance board and I'm sure I mean J could explain that to you further but there is clear rejection of that board because it promise to censor and promise to intervene in the democratic conversation that happens in every day people voted with their thumbs essentially is what I'm saying they moved they stayed on Twitter they did not move to threads you not see that as a repudiation of further censorship in our society no I don't see it as a repudiation of further censorship I see it as a decision that people decided that they didn't want to be on threads I have not seen I've seen different numbers for the popularity of threads but there are lots of in fact I've seen that threads is growing in popularity and that Twitter has repeatedly been losing both advertisers and brand advertising and that it's been losing users and so that seems to me to be not a repudiation the idea that there are censorship but the fact that people are remaining on Instagram that they're remaining on Facebook they're remaining on other types of platforms that are well governed and the people are still all over the world asking for these platforms to be better governed and better better and made safer and more responsive to their concerns I think that I think that just one example of supposedly threads declining in users is not I mean also like do you see like the collapse of parlor and gab is a repudiation that like that those were that claim to be non-censorship the fact that those didn't have massive followings those don't seem the fact that they didn't grow in massive popularity doesn't seem to be that people voted with their thumbs and decided that they wanted to go live in uncensored environments I'll come in from you Jay I'll just say like in terms of the popularity of platforms how would we know given the pervasive environment of censorship we don't have a free market in platforms and I'll say threads it absolutely has collapsed I tried to use it for a little while and I looked at it it's children of the corn happy people talking to each other I mean I don't know some people like it let's keep it orderly next question please yes this is for both of you I haven't heard much discussion about the actual injunction in the case which prevented a broad range of government agencies from contacting social media platforms and I'm wondering what do you think the upsides downsides that the injunction where it was so broad was it perfectly tailored I thought that that was exactly what I was talking about that was the majority of what I talked about was the fact that it was an overbroad substantively overbroad decision that was absolutely the issue in this case and it was overbroad and because it was so overbroad it basically made it so that there were all other areas of public health or other types of things national security or terrorism recruitment or child sexual abuse material or other types of things the decision to say we'll keep up legal speech and take down a legal speech or criminal speech these are not binary choices someone has to decide what falls into the category of legal and illegal speech and that is often decisions that the government makes and then tells the platforms to enforce and so these kinds of conversations it was unclear how any of these were going to take place in light of this decision because it was so overbroad the government decided that me saying to Governor DeSantis that toddler masking made no sense was illegal speech that's how YouTube decides to take down a video of me talking to a sitting governor of Florida if a government that is perfectly different from doing that by the Missouri views of the Biden case that is a win for free speech it's not a subtle win it's a real actual win the government abused this ambiguity that Kate is talking about in order to suppress your speech do we really want that? next question this is a kind of two-part question about disinformation addressed to both of you Dr. Batataria's case involved making a great deal out of a specific example while what's that issue is a general principle and you know what bridge the gap in Dr. Batataria's argument was suggestions about public trust and so on good to hear in some more detail how one gets from the general specific claims about COVID to general issues about censorship because you know you can have other explanations for what went wrong you know those damn Democrats is always a thing people go for yes so how do you bridge the gap there between the specific case to the general principle and the Missouri Biden case? I just to answer specifically directly your question I think that public trust is a subtle thing and the censorship is a brutal way to deal with a very subtle thing public trust and public health comes from telling the truth saying when you're wrong that you're wrong not coercing the public trusting the public as much as you expect the public to trust you that's I mean this is my expertise that's what I'd say in other areas I would say as a citizen if I'm feeling that the government is censoring me I'm not going to trust the person that's censoring me I have this like innate American disgust for people telling me not to say something I want to say it or telling me not to read something I want to read it it seems counterproductive to go down the direction we've gone if we want to build public trust and I think that but I think I share your desire to have it built I just think that this is the wrong way to do it comments okay next question hi so I have two questions one really short for Kate one really short for Jay first Kate I have a question really related to coercion so would you not agree that restriction is different from complete outright banning in the context that there is coercion from the government to social media platforms and then for Jay as well I have a question you mentioned that you don't have political biases in terms of who you choose but in legal terms when you present the case you don't have that bias supposedly right so I have a question which is you spoke vehemently against out against lockdowns so why didn't you present the case against the Trump administration when there was a almost a full year of national lockdowns in that context I permitted the young man two questions I really shouldn't have but because you only get one but anyway Kate the question what has to do with what coercion did you follow the question not really but I think you asked what the difference was between restriction and coercion yeah like you kind of insinuated throughout the debate that there was a kind of big censorship in that regard but would you not agree that there is more that this was more kind of a restriction of the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media platforms in some regards rather than a complete outright ban to the Biden administration to communicate with those platforms okay in the final preliminary injunction the ruling so the term the coercion that is being talked about the question of coercion comes up in the context of whether or not the government was coercive to a sufficient degree is to count for censorship for the purposes of Bantam books in the First Amendment this is the idea that when they were being done they weren't requesting they were actually threatening this was like the idea that like it would be a shame if something happened to your nice business that you run here type of idea that this was like a threat or a threat of regulation that is where the concept of coercion comes in so I just kind of want to set that aside the decision that came out of the of Doughty's opinion on July 4th was essentially a question of restriction it was very clear that it was a complete restriction and that these were undefined terms which is what we mean by overbroad it was unclear which government officials it was going to apply to it seemed to apply to all government officials and it was unclear what type of behavior and what types of areas and what types of speech from as I said national security to child sexual abuse material and criminal and other types of things to things like COVID and misinformation so no I don't think that it was I think that because it could be so widely construed as to be a ban then people out of an abundant government officials out of an abundance of caution would restrict all would decline to engage with platforms at all because they believed that this decision had forbidden them from doing so Jay ignore the question about Trump and just address that first question because there's only one question so address the first question or Kate's answer please Kate just mischaracterized the dowdy decision explicitly names agencies it names the CISA which is part of the State Department it names the Surgeon General's office it names the CDC it names the NIH explicit government agencies that are covered by the ruling and it names specific actions it's enjoined against telling these companies who and what to censor so that was the fifth circuit decision no that was actually dowdy's decision it lists exactly the names of the agencies yeah and then that was restricted further and further defined by the fifth circuit you said it was a general government decision that's not just not true just very fast on Trump in 2020 I was a scientist I didn't know anything about media I'd never written an op-ed before I spoke up against lockdowns as best I could I did TV interviews I did science to show to ask whether lockdowns were necessary and concluded that it wasn't based on the scientific work I did a lot of my advocacy in 2020 later in 2021 came from the scientific work not the other way around next question yes this question is primarily for Dr. Baudicharia to this case what do you see as the ideal free speech outcome is it just kind of an acknowledgement that you and your co-plaintiffs were wrong an awarding of damages or I think maybe there's something coming perhaps from the political right a little more about regulating these platforms as public utilities and mandating a little more speech from all sides what's your view on where you want that to go I'm actually fairly agnostic about many of these regulations I think that if they're finally legitimate as long as they don't violate the First Amendment what I really want is for the government to just stop violating the First Amendment especially in areas of science and public health I think it's a tremendous disaster when it does that at all but especially in these areas it hurts the poor, it hurts the vulnerable it hurts the working class it hurts children in ways that are tangible and I just want them to stop I think the observers of Biden are far out of line to just stop doing it that's why I've been doing it I'm not expecting any monetary awards I'm certainly not expecting an apology from the Biden administration they're still going to the Supreme Court saying that they were right to censor so I just want them to stop Kate, any comment? Next question? Hi, my question is for Kate in your opening statement and even throughout the debate you insinuated that you believe there was a positive reason why the government should be suppressing or censoring dis and misinformation is that your position? That there were positive reasons or that you believe that it is a just cause to censor disinformation and misinformation No, I don't think that I insinuated that at any point. I was not trying to state at any point that I thought that the government should be censoring anything I think that my argument was essentially that the government has conversations with private platforms and that those sometimes those sometimes result in platforms which have their own First Amendment rights deciding something to do and has nothing to do with I don't think that it's a just cause You mentioned that there were certain safety considerations that could stem from disinformation spreading Do you believe that? I guess my question is do you believe the government is a source of truth and should be considered a source of truth You're graduating the witness Yeah, thank you Do I believe the government is a source of truth? If the government says something is disinformation Excuse me, let's get back to the procedure Kate, do you want to say anything further? Jade, do you want to defend Kate on this issue? I mean just to steal a man's case argument I think what she's saying is that she thinks that the private entities like Twitter, like Facebook ought to have a lot of rain and the way that they get that rain is by having rules that the government sets correctly, neutrally and that the Missouri v. Biden case harms the ability for the government to set neutral rules or correct rules that allow this space to open and that's where the disagreement really fundamentally is I don't think that Kate you were saying that you wanted the government to have the truth Okay, oh yes Please, unfortunately we got to limit the rights of you questioners because we've got a lot of other people but I think both of them are coming to the party young lady so you'll be able to talk to her then I have a multi-part question but I'll be very succinct The first part of that Please, only one question Please Okay, so I think the premise of the first amendment is that even a small act of government of the government Sure, so the premise of the first amendment is that even a small act of government censorship can lead to far greater censorship because of the power of the government is so great in this context so Kate's point that the censorship that Professor Batashariya experienced on Twitter is not really censorship is not convincing to me at all in part because the social media's design decisions and architecture decisions have been iteratively changed over and over again since 2014 and even before in response to misinformation I'm getting there And what's your question? So my question is if the law is supposed to create universal principles over time that carry forth isn't the small experience of censorship that Professor Batashariya is claiming to have experienced dangerous in the sense that the social media companies have this power to iteratively alter the designs over time in response to these demands I'm not convinced at all of Kate's suggestion that it's not really censorship and my second part is just that Smitha stop Thank you Kate, would you like to respond to that? No, I'm okay You pass on I think it's just as important to sometimes to say no one not to speak Can I just, on that point I think it's actually quite an important point because some of the demands by the third parties that the government essentially deputized to enact this censorship were demands on social media platforms to change their terms of service to make previously acceptable speech no longer acceptable So the government is not just simply that they're asking, giving the platforms a list of people and ideas to censor they're changing, they're forcing the platforms to change their rules to comply in ways so that further government censorship could be said to just, oh, it's just voluntary it's a very, very insidious thing that the government did here and it was just wrong it's such a clear violation of the First Amendment it's not just a question of the social media companies having to get to set the rules they want it was really the government suppressing speech in a very 21st century way Next question So I think that maybe the issue is not even government censorship but perhaps it goes further that these social media companies are run by people who subscribe to this orthodoxy of thought within Silicon Valley So how do we deal with the fact that these social media companies have a tendency, proclivity to censor on behalf of one political ideology as opposed to the other one in terms of free speech and protecting it? This was really what I was trying to drive home with the bulk of my remarks and I'm kind of like painted in this way that I think that I'm pro-government censorship Government CDC, these agencies they are one part of a pluralistic voice that should be speaking on behalf of users generally and this is a conversation that should not just be made by king makers that happen to own 100 million user platforms in Silicon Valley I believe that we are moving towards a more progressive idea of a government or governance like structure that is going to be that can give feedback into how these policies are created and that it's not just someone like Elon Musk making a decision or Mark Zuckerberg making a decision or the people that work for him and that these are multi-stakeholder and pluralistic decisions to be made Comment, Che? I mean we've had the same conversation for so many years Next question Hi, I just want to premise this that we've been censored and signed the great Barrington Declaration and thank you I think a lot of lost when we talk about this when we realize the consequence of the censorship in the medical sector the consequence is that we had a breach in standard of care as it relates to informed consent because physicians were afraid to disclose the risks and benefits as related to the COVID vaccine biologics, mass mandates and the like My question is I'd like Jay to expand as a fellow physician on the consequence of this censorship and the failure to provide informed consent in the medical sector because this is a big point that's missed often First thank you for signing the great print Thank you for that question I don't know what to say other than amen I mean like that in California there was a law called AB 2098 that basically said to physicians that if you don't comply tell your patients what the CDC is telling you to tell your patients you could lose your license I have no idea how patients who are treated by physicians who are governed by such a law can be said to have had informed consent they're not getting the honest opinion of the physicians and that wasn't just in California that physicians felt this the censorship effort undermined medicine, it undermined public health and it led to the damaging results that we have seen to the school kids around the country as a result of the censorship we really paid an enormous cost it's not simply just a theoretical thing where like my abstract rights were violated I think that's bad I don't like that but that's what's worse what's worse is that regular people paid the price of this we have a responsibility to tell I felt the responsibility to tell you all what I thought sometimes I'm wrong I felt that responsibility and doctors also had that responsibility and it was taken away from them by these actions absolutely, thank you guys we're running out of time so the only recourse now is for you to ask your question and then the speakers might address it in their summation but just ask your question and then the next person will ask the question as well then I will be brief with the only pretense that I'd like to thank all of you or both of you for this discussion I'm big fans of both of yours if we can't have good faith discussions about this there's no hope wondering what you both are thinking about whether or not the kind of democratic and epistemic priors are in place if we are in a position to get to the kind of collaborative pluralistic governance regime over the public sphere that you seem optimistic about and that could be with regards to government agency and kind of technocratic ability to get at truth or the public ability to kind of filter out misinformation and actually arrive at some kind of thank you for your question and the next question please they'll file it away possibly in the summations go ahead my question is can you be both against the censorship of the KJ and see at the same time believe that the injection deprives the government of a pretty important policy making tool such as how could they address the impact of social media on teenage girls mental health why is it complying with this ruling the question again was what can you be both against the government's censorship of the KJ but still at the same time believe that the injection deprives the government of a pretty important policy making tool under this ruling how could they address the problem for example social media impact on teenage girls mental health thank you next question thank you so my question is on section 230 of the communication decency act which states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher there's been a lot of controversy because you see that ruling and law came out decades before social media came into play today social media considers themselves as a distributor not as a publisher obviously if they're considered a publisher for both of you is should they be treated as a distributor or a publisher and if you think they're a distributor what other alternative avenues should there be from a legislative standpoint to ensure that social media is and free speeches regulate my question is for professor so I think at the beginning you acknowledge some of these messages that were sent to the companies were questionable but I don't know exactly where you would draw the line between job owning and coercion you would be willing to agree that perhaps some instances of what the government did did cross that line even if you also think that the remedy was overbred okay next question real quick follow up on the gentleman's question on section 230 there were numerous instances of public officials basically saying that they would revisit section 230 protection for these social media companies do you think that that constituted coercion and fine do we have one final question that's it yeah well thank you for those questions it looks like we'll have a lot to talk about at the after party and both of these people as you can see are very approachable and we're going to draft them both to come to the after party but now they each get five minutes of summation and the affirmative goes first so take it away Kate would you like to take the podium just sit to the section 230 which is not really relevant in this exact debate because it is not this was a first amendment case not a section 230 case I will just briefly say that section 230 accepts intermediate platform intermediaries from torches liability if they host speech for the purposes of defamation and other types of speech torts I don't think that that is I think that I'm just glad I don't I think it was the last person you just said that there have been that trump famously issued an executive order that threatened that specifically said that it was going to remove section 230 intermediary liability after they he believed that the that the platforms were censoring him and so like I don't know of a more clear cut case of actually making good on a threat that he had made over and over again to hurt the companies then when he issued used his power as president to issue an executive order in which he punished the companies and took away threatened to take a try to take away their their intermediate liability immunity that being said I want to just I want to say that I said at the outset in the course in my remarks that I do think that there were a number of instances in which there were there was problematic things that the government said to the companies I I'm I completely disagree with how the government reached out to the companies I think that this is a problem my problem with this decision was that it was overbroad and that it basically cast the it gave very little instruction to how we should set up national internet policy or how the actual organic policy of the internet as it has been constructed over the last 25 years is developed and I that is that is I think that that is a very middle of kind of the road reasonable decision to say I'm not talking about the government being the arbiters of truth I am not talking about them deciding what is true and what is not true I am simply saying that these are decisions in which the government specifically cannot be I am acknowledging this the government cannot be the one making internet policy I am I think that there is a really there is a huge problem in the like this is the government has decided this and Reno versus ACLU in which it specifically said that the communications decency act was unconstitutional under the First Amendment that the government cannot make these rules that are going to dictate what is on these platforms and that we're going you know and that they can't decide that it's indecent to have pornography which is First Amendment protected speech and this is this is we've established that over and over again and so we have come right to construct and to create basically a curated space as they want to curate it so the government have much say it not a lot but some say in that in a multi-stakeholder society in a pluralistic Western democracy yes I think that there is some role in which that has a place to play after all someone elects these officials and so there are there is like there is absolutely a place for this to have go forward and having a over-broad decision is just going to risk having absolutely no type of regulation and make the public health discussion worse. Thank you Kate. You have five minutes. Would you like to take the podium? You'll do it from the chair. Take the podium. So I'll just note that Kate's response about section 230 highlights the importance of the Missouri vs. Biden case if Missouri vs. Biden was in force during the Trump administration that executive order would have been unconstitutional under the Missouri vs. Biden case or legal or I'm not sure what the right legal term is I'm only a fringe epidemiologist. So the key point is the government should not be using have the ability to use threats against these companies to allow the kinds of speech that the government wants on there. The Missouri vs. Biden case is not over-broad. It specifically addresses that key point. It lists specific agencies that over-reached about this and says those agencies are not allowed to do this. It gives a set of especially as we've seen as it's gone up the appeals process they haven't really fundamentally restricted the scope of it. The scope of like what the government is or is not allowed to do regarding telling social media companies what and who to censor, every single court that's looked at this has agreed that they shouldn't be doing this. What's at issue right now is whether the government should be allowed to go give grants to Stanford University and say Stanford you guys figure out who ought to be censored and then use this theory to go censor everybody. That's what's currently at issue. That's the main difference between what the appeals court did and what the Judge Gerry Dowdy did in the circuit court or in the lower court. What you have is not an over-broad decision. What you have is a decision that is absolutely tailor made to address the key problem of free speech that happened under two administrations during the pandemic that still the government is still telling the courts that it needs that power to censor you and me in order to protect the public. I'm just going to end with saying that that is a lie. It is an absolute lie and you can tell it was a lie because they use the power to censor free discussion of absolutely key important public health and scientific matters that had they been freely debated would have resulted in a vastly different and better policy. Much more akin to what happened in Sweden than what happened in the United States and as a result our school children would be better educated. Many people who are currently dead would be alive and public health trust would not be destroyed the way it has been. Censorship kills and the Missouri versus the Biden case is an absolutely key decision that if it's upheld it would prevent this kind of overreach by governments in the future. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I don't want to put my entire faith in the American system of governments based on one decision especially since I love this country. If we lose the Missouri versus the Biden case I don't know what free speech looks like in this country. Thank you. Grant, please I have been voting for the final vote to my embarrassment in our Sunday confusion. I left the so-for-um Tootsie roll at home but the after party will be held at my home and the winner will be awarded the Tootsie roll at the after party. So again the resolution reads the making of national internet policy was hindered rather than helped by the federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms. Please vote yes, no, or undecided about the resolution. Again our party is two blocks up town follow me, follow the crowds and you can join both debaters food and drink available to all. We are not done at the so-for-um. We host debates every month and our next debate will be Monday, January 29th and there the resolution will read government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research. You wouldn't imagine that that could be debated but libertarians do regard it as relatable. The affirmative will be taken by Tony Mills of the American Enterprise Institute. The negative will be taken by Terence Kealy, author of a book called The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. All of these debates that I'm going to read to you are available for ticket sales on our website the so-for-um.org. On Monday, February 26th we're going to have a resolution that will read the root cause of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians rejection of Israel's right to exist. Now that debate will be held not here but at the Soho Playhouse on Van Damme Street about a mile to the west of here. The tickets are available. The resolution will be defended by American journalist Eli Lake and opposed by journalist Jeremy Hammond. Again, that will be at the Soho Playhouse about a mile west of here. On Monday, March 25th we're going to return to a COVID pandemic and that resolution will read capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. That will be defended by best-selling author Joe Nasera co-author of The Big Fail, what the pandemic revealed about who America protects and who it leaves behind in that case, taking the negative will be me. And Grant, how we doing on the voting? Do I see you anywhere? The votes are still rolling in? Two minutes? One minute, okay, fine. And then we are going to have in April yet another aspect of the COVID issue. The debate will be based on the resolution government imposed restrictions during the COVID pandemic were prudent and essential. And that will be opposed by Tom Woods of the Tom Woods podcast and defended by Brent Orell of the American Enterprise Institute. Drum roll please because I'm about to read the results. Again, the resolution, the making of internet policy was hindered rather than helped. The yes votes grew from 9.6% to 18.1% and picked up 8.5% of the vote. Congratulations to the yes side. But the 8.5 was the number to beat. The negative votes went from 41.5 to 73.4 so it picked up 31.9% so Jay you must come over and accept your Tutsi roll. Congratulations to your body.