MSNBC legal analyst and former U.S. attorney appointed by President Obama, Barbara McQuade said Wednesday on “Chris Jansing Reports” that there was “actually some merit” to a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri over U.S. government officials encourage social media companies to deal with, remove or limit traffic to posts they thought could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the COVID pandemic.
Tuesday, a federal judge barred several Biden administration agencies from communicating with social media companies about speech protected by the First Amendment.
McQuade said, “I think it’s important to separate two things. One is the opinion itself where this judge writes 155 pages, is clearly swinging from the fences, buys into this whole idea that this is some sort of vast censorship conspiracy against conservative voices, and it’s really quite distracting.”
She continued, “But if you look at the substance of the lawsuit, there’s actually some merit there. We don’t want the government telling social media what they can and can’t do. But it’s tricky because as long as I’ve been in government, the government does work cooperatively with social media companies to remove things from ISIS and al-Qaeda, for example, to remove things put up by child pornographers. And one of the things that is alleged here is that the government was asking the social media companies to take down falsehoods about COVID and home remedies and things that could be very dangerous. And so there is, I have to believe, some room for the government to try to act in the best interest of the public in coordinating messaging with social media companies.”
McQuade added, “But at the same time, there are some allegations of some very heavy-handed tactics here where the government was pressuring social media companies to say what it wanted to say. I don’t know that they go so far as to suggest that this administration was acting in bad-faith, but the point is, when the government is telling social media companies what to do, there is a risk of censorship there. So I think it’ll be important to see how this case shakes out as it proceeds.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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