‘More speech is being censored and suppressed by government actions than has ever been the case in the past,’ constitutional attorney Andrew Grossman says.
A growing government–corporate partnership in the United States to control what Americans say has established an unprecedented system of censorship that circumvents and undermines the constitutional right to free speech, legal analysts say.
While free speech advocates fight this new form of “censorship by proxy” in the courts, many have expressed concern that even prevailing in the lawsuits may not be enough to preserve First Amendment rights.
“More Americans are being censored, more speech is being censored and suppressed by government actions, than has ever been the case in the past,” Andrew Grossman, constitutional attorney at BakerHostetler, told attendees at a Cato Institute free-speech conference on Nov. 2.
“But this isn’t primarily the old kind of censorship. We’re not talking about book bans; we’re not talking about other types of traditional restraints on speech or publications. What we’re talking about is a phenomenon that I call ‘government censorship by proxy.’”
Adding to extensive prior evidence of “censorship by proxy” by the Biden administration, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Nov. 6 released a report titled “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation,’ Pseudo-experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.”
The report states, “What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship–industrial complex.”
Mr. Jordan wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “hundreds of secret reports show how the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], the State Department, Stanford [University], and others worked together to censor Americans before the 2020 election, including true information, jokes, and opinions.”
“The federal government, disinformation ‘experts’ at universities, Big Tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor and censor Americans’ speech,” he wrote.
Currently, the United States awaits what is expected to be a landmark First Amendment decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Missouri v. Biden. This case, which was originally brought by then-state Attorneys General Eric Schmitt in Missouri and Jeff Landry in Louisiana, accuses the Biden administration of arm-twisting social media companies into blocking speech that contradicted the state narrative regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
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