You may recall that a couple of months ago a right-wing federal judge ruled that the Biden administration had been engaging in a "regime of mass censorship" straight out of 1984. This was all about the government's effort to fight social media disinformation in the areas of public health and election administration, and the judge's displeasure was largely triggered by his finding that "Flagged content was almost entirely from political figures [etc.]...associated with right-wing or conservative political views." As a result, he banned multiple agencies from any contact with social media companies that was intended to affect their moderation of deceitful content.
The 5th Circuit Court is also famously right wing, but on appeal even they couldn't stomach most of this, as the Washington Post reports:
Doughty’s decision had affected a wide range of government departments and agencies and imposed 10 specific prohibitions on government officials. The appeals court threw out nine of those and modified the 10th to limit it to efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
The 5th Circuit panel also limited the government institutions affected by its ruling to the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI. It removed restrictions Doughty had imposed on the departments of State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services and on agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The circuit court killed nine out ten prohibitions and six out of ten agencies from the original ruling. Still, the 5th Circuit is gonna do what the 5th Circuit is gonna do, so it found a way to uphold part of one prohibition on a few agencies who, they said, had adopted a "persistent and angry" tone in certain cases and had sent "intimidating" messages.
That's about it. And yet, the Post opined that this was "likely to be seen as victory for conservatives." I'm not sure where that comes from. A conservative court demolished a conservative ruling, keeping only a small part where they managed to divine coercion. And even that's pretty meaningless since it will be appealed to the Supreme Court.
But the right is louder than the left, and I imagine that "Biden censored conservatives!" will quickly make their Top Ten list. So I guess that makes it a victory for their side after all.
That's because it resulted in the circuit court finding that supported Doughty's finding of coercion.
I could have written that better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, you did fine.
Who cares? Happy to see people die from a “cold” from here on out.
But the right is louder than the left ...
True, and of course they can never lose because they are righteous, so no matter happens they MUST have won, but it isn't ONLY a matter of well-funded lock-step messaging. For whatever reason, the MSM have been leaning hard against Biden for at least a month now, so they're gonna take any news story (or poll result! or or or) that has any straw they can clutch at and run with their currently preferred narrative.
And of course it does no good to complain about it (other than venting), and This Too Shall Pass as soon as people start paying attention to the election (which is fourteen months away FFS), and we just need to soldier on -- organize, volunteer, donate, etc. -- but jeez it's starting to get tiresome. Shades of Her Emails...
'For whatever reason, the MSM have been leaning hard against Biden
for at least a month nowsince he was elected in November 2020, so they're gonna take any news story (or poll result! or or or) that has any straw they can clutch at and run with their currently preferred narrative.'Fixed it for ya. Kinda. To really fix it, you need to replace 'For whatever reason' with 'Because they don't like Democratic policies or Biden's refusal to take them seriously, the MSM have been leaning hard against Biden ...'
Everything is a win for the magarepubs. If they can't spin it or exaggerate something, they'll outright lie.
Everything is a loss for the Dems ("in disarray") because the news media seems required to spin it that way, and because of the lefties themselves. Secretary Haaland stops oil and gas exploration right around Chaco Canyon? Well, damn her for not stopping it EVERYWHERE! And the media covers a few spun-up GQP-funded Navajos who thought they could make big bucks from royalties.
Biden revokes drilling leases in ANWR? So what? He's allowed drilling elsewhere!
Everything is a win for the right, a devastating blow from the left - with the left's full cooperation.
Conservatives are extolling it as if it vindicated everything they were saying, so...
Not that the ruling even makes a whit of sense beyond the struck bits. Is the government supposed to encourage misinformation? I'm confused as to what the court's solution is.
The problem that we face is that outrageous lies and conspiracy theories have become an alternate reality supported by right wing politicians and presented as “the truth”. It isn’t just that “masks and vaccines don’t work”, it’s that they were a lie spread by the Libs to control the population and to harm Trump. And whether the right wing politicians believe it or not, they are all in with using it as a “political belief”. So trying to stop the spread of the disinformation is thus seen as silencing “conservative voices”. In that environment a government agency attempting to stop the spread of disinformation is violating the First Amendment right of free political speech.
So if we had this political environment in the 60’s and 70’s and right wingers spread the conspiracy theory that smoking was good for your health and the government requiring health warnings on cigarette packaging was an attempt to control the people then information regarding the health risks of smoking would have been seen as political speech and the government requiring those warnings would be overstepping and suppressing right wing political views.
So, public health is now a political belief. In the world of the Republican Party the vaccine not only doesn’t work, but it’s harmful. Attempts to mitigate disease are actually fascist attempts at control. I hold the Republican politicians who know this is BS responsible.
But something else is also true and it was kind of hard for me to reach this conclusion. I think that many right wing politicians actually believe this shit. I thought it was all just opportunism but I don’t think so anymore. A large percentage of this country in just plain nuts in a way I never thought possible.
Like +10! We've moved from cagey, opportunistic exploiters like "Carnival" Cruz to dumb as a stump dupes like Tommy Tubberman. They're recruiting both the scum and the dregs now.
These days, a small win on a tiny part of a complaint constitutes a massive victory for conservatives. Gotta flaunt what ya got, when it ain't much.
"But the right is louder than the left, ..."
The headline on the Post story (as presented by Google news) is "5th Circuit rules Biden administration violated First Amendment". If this isn't a fair summary of the story perhaps you should blame Google and the Post.
From Judge Doughty’s opinion:
Equally plausibly, ‘the Government apparently engaged in a massive effort to suppress misinformation about COVID-19, which was causing people to behave in ways injurious to their health. It appears that virtually all of this misinformation appeared in conservative media. The court will not speculate as to the reason(s) for this association.’
Did the court find cases of harmful misinformation published by liberal media that weren’t flagged by the government? No.
A few wingnuts of my acquaintence complained constantly about all the negative stories about The Defendant, when that individual was squatting, toadlike, in the White House. Unfair coverage! was their constant complaint -- why didn't the press cover the Crimes of the Democrats?
"Because there were few to none" and certainly not of a similar magnitude was something that they simply would not accept.
Similarly, when the vast preponderance of lies are coming from the Republican side, well -- that makes them "political speech", not LIES. You can't suppress (or even criticize) "free speech"! First Amendment!!
It seems as if our courts, media (aka "press"), and politics of the reactionary right no longer recognize the concepts of "truth", or even "reality."
Another commenter on another section said: It's ok now to yell SAFE in a crowded theater on fire.