Last week during a congressional hearing, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) blasted President Joe Biden’s administration for targeting Americans for one-sided censorship.
At a House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing, he appeared to discuss information he obtained in the discovery phase of his ongoing censorship lawsuit and as one of the parties suing the Biden Administration for allegedly colluding with Big Tech platforms to censor online content pertaining to issues like Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID-19 in the State of Missouri v. Biden lawsuit.
"The White House pressured YouTube to reduce watch time of 'borderline' content by 70%, the FBI boasted a 50% success rate in getting platforms to censor misinformation," he said during the hearing. "The Election Integrity Partnership bragged that 35% of URLs shared with Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube were either labeled, removed or soft blocked.”
The Louisiana AG also noted that Big Tech subjected scientists and journalists to the one-sided censorship.
“As a result of this collaboration between social media companies and the CDC, NIH, and NIAID, American citizens, scientists, and journalists were shadowbanned, censored, silenced, and de-platformed for their valid concerns about lockdowns, masks, COVID vaccines, and more," he added.
Landry later tweeted about his experience testifying in the hearing, saying the censorship was a direct violation of the First Amendment.
“No one is safe when the First Amendment is violated,” he tweeted, “If the Federal Government doesn’t like what you’re saying, they will censor you—regardless of political affiliation. I’m working to protect the free speech of all Americans.”
The fallout from the censorship has probably been more drastic than the Biden administration expected. Last week, MRC Free Speech America reported that U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty warned Americans in a 77-page ruling in the case of State of Missouri v. Biden that the “threat of future censorship” is “substantial.”He added that, “the history of past censorship is strong evidence that the threat of further censorship is not illusory or merely speculative."
An attorney for the plaintiffs later said the ruling proves the censorship was not a coincidence.
"The ruse that it was just a coincidence that all the tech companies silenced the same people saying the same things at the same time has been exposed for the canard it is," New Civil Liberties Alliance senior litigation counsel John Vecchione said in a press release after the ruling.
The lawsuit cites an MRC Free Speech America study that revealed 646 instances of social media platforms censoring public criticism of Biden between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency clarity on so-called hate speech and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
