Recent reports found that a corporate-aligned litigation group with ties to right-wing petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch is suing officials and agencies in the Biden administration, alleging that the administration influenced content moderation decisions made by social media companies during the Covid-19 pandemic. The case centers around the administration’s efforts to get Americans vaccinated, with the lawsuit claiming that the government coerced social media companies to restrict posts on Facebook and TikTok.
The case was brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a Koch-funded group, representing individuals who allege they sustained injuries from the Covid vaccines. In previous lawsuits, the NCLA argued that the government pressured social media platforms to inappropriately and illegally restrict content that the platforms deemed as misinformation. The Supreme Court ultimately threw out that previous lawsuit.
WALKER BRAGMAN; walker@optout.news
Bragman is a journalist and co-founder of the OptOut Media Foundation. He writes the Substack Important Context.
“These censorship lawsuits,” Bragman told the Institute for Public Accuracy, “are an iteration of the war on public health. During the pandemic, we saw right-wing groups fund and recruit people to protest the stay-at-home orders. Other groups used the pandemic to lobby against organized labor and encourage reopening quickly. Ultimately, Covid has shifted out of the public focus. That is the reality. As that has happened, right-wing operatives have shifted their focus from opposing lockdown measures to rewriting history in a way that validates fringe contrarian views. They have launched lawsuits to show that their arguments were rejected during the pandemic not because they were discredited, but because there was a conspiracy against them.
“The pandemic was an inflection point. We’ve seen the right-wing attack on sciences shift from the social sciences toward the harder sciences. With Covid, the right-wing attack on academia and science has moved into [fields like] virology and biology. The organized right-wing has come to realize that the hard sciences are a threat to their interests. Panels at academic institutions are being used to rewrite history, poisoning the well of mitigation measures to prevent them from being used in the future and undermining the public’s faith in scientific institutions. But these ideas do not hold up under academic scrutiny.
“The reality is that we will have future pandemics. Because of the rate of global warming and climate change, our next pandemic will be in the next decade. These groups want to poison the well of public health measures and take them off the table, so that no government will be able to impose a lockdown or tell private businesses to do anything to protect their workers. These lawsuits are protecting business interests down the line.
“Covid-19 was an eye opener for business interests and power players. They realized that effectively dealing with a pandemic like Covid would necessitate a government that they have spent the last 50 years trying to preclude. Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort to reshape American society to benefit a free market. That infrastructure was mobilized by Covid, because it became clear to groups like the Heritage Foundation early on that effective pandemic response was intolerable to them––as it required government action on a scale that they were not okay with.”
OptOut, which tracks right-wing disinformation campaigns to undermine public health, is “focused on [pandemic reporting] to a degree that other outlets are not. Beginning with the early part of the pandemic, OptOut has been tracking the right-wing disinformation effort to undermine public health and prevent the mitigation measures in future pandemics that are not economically [beneficial] to big business. This effort borrows tactics from the Big Tobacco and Big Oil playbooks, but those playbooks have adapted through the Covid-19 era; they take advantage of social media in a way that previous iterations have not. It’s important to track this because people don’t realize how bad things are, and how much worse they could get.”