In a First Amendment case, a judge has prohibited U.S. officials from contacting social media companies. On Wednesday, talk show host Erick Erickson discussed this decision made by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana.
A lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri in 2022, which eventually led to a granted injunction.
“What this case is about is the federal government, using social media companies to censor, online, those people they disagreed with when it came to the vaccine when it came to stories about the vaccine,” Erickson said. “They wished to censor. Look, for example, at what Twitter did to people who had the audacity to suggest that this virus might have come from a lab in Wuhan.”
On Twitter, Republican U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, who served as Missouri’s attorney general during the lawsuit, expressed that the ruling was a significant victory for the First Amendment and a setback for censorship.
Erickson emphasized that Twitter was disabling accounts for sharing COVID misinformation, and he believed it was a form of government-backed censorship.
“That censorship is a censorship that is unconstitutional,” he said. “This job has stopped [censorship], and yet if you read the newspapers of America today, they’re alarmed at this. Under [President] Joe Biden, if you wanted to go on TV and echo the party line, they were perfectly fine with you doing it.”
Erickson acknowledged that some individuals were raising inappropriate doubts about pandemic-related matters. Specifically, he cited an example where MSNBC continuously informed its audience that being fully vaccinated would prevent one from contracting COVID-19.
“At the same time, there were people on the right who wanted you to believe that you get the COVID vaccine and fall over dead five years later, and it was the COVID vaccine that did that. There are conspiracy theorists on both sides, but the conspiracy theorists on the left were amplified, and the conspiracy theorists on the right were silenced.”
