The Alito-Jordan Report on the Biden White House and the Murthy-Murthy Correspondence: Defending Covid Misinformation via the Lab Leak Hypothesis
The lab leak hypothesis is one of the examples Alito focuses on in his dissent, as well as how Facebook moderated covid misinformation. The report was published by the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Jim Jordan. Jordan attended oral arguments in Murthy.
Alito accuses the majority of allowing the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say. He added that the message was that a coercive campaign may get by if it’s carried out well.
In his dissent, Alito wrote that “valuable speech was … suppressed.” A footnote that immediately followed cited the lab leak hypothesis, a minority scientific theory that covid originated from a laboratory in China.
Chief Justice John Roberts was one of the justices who wrote the majority opinion. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
The case was brought by the attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that government agencies have had undue influence on the content moderation practices of platforms and coerced the platforms into taking down conservative-leaning content, infringing on the First Amendment rights of their citizens. The case alleged that government agencies, such as the CDC and CSIA, coerced social media companies into taking down posts questioning the validity of the 2020 election.
The House Judiciary Committee report, which contained internal communications among high-ranking tech executives, concluded that the “Biden White House coerced companies to suppress free speech.” The US Virgin Islands lawmaker accused the Republicans of a last ditch effort to influence the Supreme Court opinion in the case of Murthy v. Missouri.
Missouriattorney general Eric Schmitt stated that members of the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to remove truthful information related to lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, and more. The government couldn’t communicate with social media platforms last year due to an injunction.
While it is the government’s responsibility to make sure it refrains from jawboning—the practice in which governments and leaders appeal to the public in an effort to influence the behavior of private companies, and in ways that potentially violate free speech—Kate Ruane, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says that there are very valid reasons why government agencies might need to communicate with platforms.
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the court’s decision earlier this cycle on a case called National Rifle Association v. Vullo was likely an indicator for how it would approach the Murthy decision. In the Vullo case, the NRA accused the New York department of financial services of pressuring banks and insurance companies not to do business with the organization. The court ruled that a case against Vullo could move forward after considering the evidence presented by the NRA. The opinion stated that Vullo allegedly threatened to wield her power against those who were not willing to support her campaign to punish the gun-promotion advocacy of the National Rifle Association.
“Other than that the facts involved are sort of politically motivated, the legal issue itself is not something that I think traditionally breaks down along partisan lines,” says Greene.
It could be easier to contact platforms if there was clear guidelines for state, local, and federal government bodies. He says that we will see more of that type of government involvement in the processes.
One of the two rapid-response projects connected to today’s decision, the Electoral Integrity Partnership, kicked off in early September 2020 and ran for 11 weeks. Researchers scoured Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms for misinformation about the 2020 US presidential election and generated more than 600 ‘tickets’ to flag questionable posts to the platforms. Most of the false narratives identified were associated with the political right, and around 35% of them were later labelled, removed or restricted by the companies.
Renée DiResta, a staff member at the observatory who was not renewed this year, says that even though the programme was shut down, the decision gives a boost to the politicians who undermined the election. She says that the right wing is doing victory laps. “Every university should be horrified by this.”
On 14 June, the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee had a post on it. It then celebrated the “robust oversight” of committee leader Jim Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Jordan has launched congressional investigations of academics linked to the election and health misinformation projects.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank in New York City that advocates for voting rights, says that all of this discouraged efforts to identify and counteract false narratives. She thinks this is of concern because Biden and Trump are about to face off again in the upcoming presidential election in the U.S.
The lawsuits by conservative activists have sparked fear among misinformation researchers, and changes to the online environment have made it harder for them to carry out their work. For instance, after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter (now called X), he instituted policies that cut off academics’ access to data on the platform. There are other social-media companies who have backed away from efforts to moderate content.
In addition to filing the lawsuit that the Supreme Court ruled on today, conservative activists have peppered researchers with public-records requests and filed other suits accusing the academics behind the two projects of colluding with the federal government to curtail free speech.
The Virality Project: A State of the Art. Defending the 2020 US Presidential Election from Social-Media Posts Concerning the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Virality Project ran from February to August 2021, and was adapted by the researchers. They notified US health authorities, as well as social-media companies, of more than 900 instances of problematic social-media posts relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of which focused on falsehoods about vaccines.
“Elated. Kate Starbird, a misinformation researcher who works at the University of Washington in Seattle and is involved in both academic efforts to combat misinformation, said that the response to Nature was vindicated.
Many conservative activists and politicians thought that these efforts were politically motivated and targeted at Republican voices, including those who posted online that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. The Supreme Court decided today that the US government can be sued. This case was originally filed in May 2022 in a federal district court in Louisiana by plaintiffs including the then-attorneys-general of Missouri and Louisiana, both of whom had also challenged whether US President Joe Biden actually won the 2020 election.
“This ruling is a major victory for independent research,” says Rebekah Tromble, who leads the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University in Washington DC. “In rejecting the conspiracy theories at the heart of the case, the Supreme Court demonstrated that facts do still matter.”