(ConservativeSense.com) – According to a federal court of appeals ruling, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the surgeon general, the White House, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) all violated the First Amendment rights of a Stanford doctor by collaborating with social media platforms to silence him during the pandemic in 2020.
When the widespread lockdowns were issued by governments around the world in 2020, a Stanford University professor of medicine, health research policy, and economics, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, helped found a movement of health professionals questioning the medical ethics of lockdowns. Together, they co-authored a treatise called the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates for an evidence-based approach to pandemics that prioritizes the sick and vulnerable while allowing the rest of society to function.
According to Bhattacharya, although they were “just acting as scientists,” they were “almost immediately” censored across the internet. On top of social media platforms like Facebook removing the Great Barrington Declaration page, the search engine Google “de-boosted” the organization. It was “a crazy time,” Bhattacharya says.
Now, a New Orleans panel of three judges has ruled in favor of Bhattacharya, determining that the federal government colluded with companies to stop certain viewpoints from being expressed about the pandemic response.
Bhattacharya said the “censorship enterprise” of the government is “vast” and that it’s been “systematically used” to strongarm social media companies into violating the First Amendment rights of users. The professor believes these companies were threatened by the government to censor “these people” and “these ideas, or else.”
Social media companies have been under particular scrutiny for censorship over the last few years after the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was denied for a long time until the mainstream media finally had to admit the story was true. And not only was it true, they knew it was, and they then actively cooperated with the federal government to bury that story in the middle of a presidential election to which it was relevant.
The ruling in favor of Bhattacharya is another win for free speech.
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