SCOTUS Dismisses Republican Lawsuit Claiming Biden Administration Controls Social Media
Source: Congressional Quarterly / Getty
To hear Republicans tell it, the GOP is experiencing an era of unprecedented discrimination not seen since in America some guy named Jim Crow kept telling Black people which establishments they couldn’t enter through the front door. Republicans, right-wing media personalities and other assorted MAGA minions have likened the prosecutions and conviction of Donald Trump to the very same kind of systemic injustice experienced by Black people in courtrooms, including but not limited to the acquittal of the white men who killed Emmett Till. (Yes, you read that right. And no, I also didn’t realize the peak of Mt. Caucasity was quite that high, but here we are.) They have also falsely claimed that Jan. 6 rioters are being prosecuted while Black Lives Matter rioters got off scot-free.
So, don’t be surprised if GOP legislators claim it’s because of a two-tier justice system that they’re not having the same legal success against President Joe Biden and his administration. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit filed by state attorneys in Louisiana and Missouri arguing that the Biden administration has been censoring conservatives by applying governmental pressure to social media sites forcing these privately-owned companies to take down the dangerous and fact-deficient misinformation they are constantly polluting the information highway with.
According to the L.A. Times, the justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the plaintiffs hadn’t presented evidence that anyone from the Biden administration was sitting in a White House office with a universal “block” button they use to filter out every brain-fart Republican conservatives have (or however the hell these people think social media works). Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel Alito were the dissenting judges.
Source: OLIVIER DOULIERY / Getty
From the Times:
The ruling throws out a broad court order issued last year by a federal judge in Louisiana and upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that threatened hundreds of Biden administration officials with a contempt citation if they “significantly encouraged” a platform to remove some content.
Social media sites did not sue or complain their rights were violated.
Instead, Republican state attorneys in Missouri and Louisiana sued alleging the right to free speech in this country was being violated by the Biden administration’s “sprawling federal censorship enterprise.” They pointed to actions by the White House as well as the FBI, the Office of the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We can certainly count on conservatives not to have the critical thinking capacity to consider that the U.S. Constitution was crafted more than two centuries before the advent of high-speed internet, just as the crafters of the Second Amendment couldn’t possibly have conceived the high-capacity, mass shooting-accommodating firearms available to the public today. But if they can’t follow that logic, the least they could do is consider that conservatives aren’t the only social media users who get their posts taken down.
Black people have spent several years intentionally misspelling the word “white” and making up words like “wypipo” as alternatives to calling a Caucasian a Caucasian just so we can avoid getting our accounts suspended for “violating community standards” by posting about anti-Black racism. People of all ideologies have complained about the same treatment conservatives think is only happening to them, and if these whiny wypipo (that’s mostly who it is) truly believe they are being disproportionately targeted, they might consider that the reason is they spread a disproportionate amount of dangerous and factless misinformation that could exacerbate a public health crisis, or—oh, I don’t know—cause a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol over “widespread election fraud” that does not exist.
As the Times noted, no social media company officials have sued the Biden administration for taking down posts—and they’re the ones who would know and be able to present evidence that the administration was directly responsible for the removals.
Ironically, it is Republican government officials who have actually meddled in the way social media platforms operate. According to Independent Record, “In February, the court heard arguments over Republican-passed laws in Florida and Texas that prohibit large social media companies from taking down posts because of the views they express, and, “In March, the court laid out standards for when public officials can block their social media followers.” So, Republican conservatives are claiming without evidence that the Biden administration is unfairly using its power to pressure privately-owned social media companies to bend to its will—while literally passing legislation that forces social media companies to bend to the will of Republican conservatives. (Actually, that’s not irony, just good old American hypocrisy.)
Anyway, this isn’t the first time Republican legislators have engaged in the practice of throwing baseless lawsuits at the wall and hoping some of them stick, and certainly won’t be the last. They’ll continue baselessly claiming that Republicans and conservatives are being systematically discriminated against while routinely dismissing and denying the existence of systemic racism no matter what actual data indicates. They’ll continue to tell marginalized people they have a “victim mentality” while displaying the most visceral persecution complex imaginable.
Sad.
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