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Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

The government can say whatever they want in press conferences or through their social media. Both the government and their employees have as much free speech as they want - and not only that but they spent billions of dollars for advocacy groups especially during covid. (which we know now was used to promote fraudulent science)

The injunction says the government can't urge, pressure or encourage censorship. (yes everyone should read it). You have to be joking you think that is a bad thing.

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> but they spent billions of dollars for advocacy groups especially during covid. (which we know now was used to promote fraudulent science)

....what.

But they can't? Not according to this judge:

> Some of the statements that Doughty deemed to be coercion were made in public by Biden and other administration officials. "When asked about what his message was to social-media platforms when it came to COVID-19, President Biden stated: 'they're killing people. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and that—they're killing people,'" Doughty wrote.

This judge thinks that merely publishing information that other people believe constitutes censorship.

>Various social-media platforms changed their content-moderation policies to require suppression of content that was deemed false by CDC and led to vaccine hesitancy. The CDC became the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms, deciding whether COVID-19 statements made on social media were true or false. And the CDC was aware it had become the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms. If the CDC said a statement on social media was false, it was suppressed, in spite of alternative views. By telling social-media companies that posted content was false, the CDC Defendants knew the social-media company was going to suppress the posted content. The CDC Defendants thus likely “significantly encouraged” social-media companies to suppress free speech.

I post on Twitter "I'm gonna beat up anyone who disagrees with the CDC about vaccines!"

CDC views my post

Now, the CDC can't say anything about vaccines, because they know it'll be violently enforced.

The CDC ceases to exist because of my legal jiu jitsu

Thank you. The real issue here is a small number of companies have become the defacto gatekeepers of a large amount of public discourse. That’s a major problem that this debate is just a symptom of.

And "people believe what they see on Twitter" isn't a problem the court can fix.

It would be harder for the government to censor speech if their were more diverse venues for speech, yes.

But the real issue - the matter before the Court - is whether the government is abusing its power by directing the venues to stifle one type of speech and promote another. An injunction is issued when a judge deems the plaintiff likely to succeed on the merits, and the harm inflicted by the defendant’s actions in the meantime to not be redressable.

That is not anywhere in the injunction.

You are taking a statement about the climate created by overreaching government demands out of context. When a government repeatedly makes authoritarian demands, it causes widespread suppression outside the scope of the initial demands.

But that has nothing to do with the specifics of the injunction. Once again people should read it, and decide if anything in the injunction restricts legitimate government free speech. (it doesn’t)

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