It’s well-known that the Biden administration set up channels with various social media companies to censor online opinions it disliked during the 2020 election.
Since the government constitutionally cannot impose that censorship itself, what happened was various government groups sent their complaints to a couple of private foundations, who then forwarded the censorship instructions to social media, which took the comments down.
But the Biden administration wasn’t the only governmental group doing that. The California state government also, through its “Office of Election Cybersecurity,” was doing the same thing.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court is facing a request for a ruling on whether that destroyed the First Amendment’s ban on governmental censorship.
A report at Scotusblog reveals that among petitions pending before the court is one from Rogan O’Handley concerning California’s scheme.
“In 2018, California established an Office of Election Cybersecurity to combat misinformation posted online about voting and the electoral process. Overseen by California’s secretary of state, the office works closely with social media companies to identify posts about elections that might violate the platforms’ own guidelines on misinformation,” the report explained.
“Although the ultimate decision about whether to remove content rests with the platforms, the state’s designation has overwhelmingly proven decisive. During the 2020 election cycle, for example, 98% of the nearly 300 posts that the Office of Election Cybersecurity had flagged as potential misinformation for Facebook and Twitter were removed.”
O’Handley was suspended by Twitter after he posted comments calling for ballots in the state to be audited, and others.
“Four months after his account was suspended, O’Handley filed a lawsuit against Twitter and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. O’Handley argued that Twitter and California had acted in tandem to restrict his First Amendment rights,” the report said.
His charges were rejected by a federal judge in California, and well as the often-overturned 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, even though those judges conceded “it is possible to draw a causal line from the OEC’s flagging of the November 12th post to O’Handley’s suspension.”
The judges there worked hard to explain that California exercised “governmental authority” in flagging the comments, but then Twitter “was following its own rules” to censor him.
Now O’Handley wants the Supreme Court to rule on the government operations that resulted in his censorship.
He said the “distinction” made by the lower courts is “illusory.”
He charged that Twitter had never monitored his content before it was flagged by the Office of Election Cybersecurity and it would not have subjected him to greater scrutiny had the state not brought attention to his account.
