Missouri A.G. sues Biden Administration officials for alleged social media censorship

JEFFERSON CITY — The Missouri Attorney General, alongside the Louisiana Attorney General, filed a lawsuit against several key players in the Biden Administration for "allegedly colluding with Social Media Giants" in censoring conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt, also a Republican Senate candidate, announced the suit on Thursday, alongside Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry.

"Missourians and Americans use social media platforms, which are now ubiquitous in our modern society, to discuss topics like the efficacy of masks and the veracity of the lab-leak theory," Schmitt said in a press release. "In direct contravention to the First Amendment and freedom of speech, the Biden Administration has been engaged in a pernicious campaign to both pressure social media giants to censor and suppress speech and work directly with those platforms to achieve that censorship in a misguided and Orwellian campaign against ‘misinformation.'"

The lawsuit names several top officials from the Biden Administration, including President Joe Biden himself, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci, and the CDC itself.

Schmitt alleges the Biden Administration "both pressured and colluded with social media giants" including Meta (Facebook's parent company), Twitter, and YouTube to "censor free speech in the name of combatting 'disinformation' and 'misinformation,' which led to the suppression and censorship of truthful information on several topics, including COVID-19."

The lawsuit cites three primary case examples of what Schmitt alleges to be social media censorship. One involved a New York Post article on the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the President's son, with "compromising pictures and emails." Twitter barred the New York Post's account from posting for a time afterward. Recently, the New York Times and the Washington Post have corroborated the story.

Other stories involved COVID-19 theories, such as whether or not the original coronavirus strain leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, as well as the efficacy of masks.

The lawsuit then cites specific instances in which government officials made policy suggestions regarding social media platforms and vice versa.