A Kolkata-born professor at Stanford University, teaming up with fellow scientists, won a landmark legal victory in a free speech censorship case against the US government.
“The victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic,” writes Jay (shortened from Jayanta) Bhattacharya in a fascinating account detailing the why and how of the legal action, published online in The Free Press (thefp.com) on Monday.
Bhattacharya, who researches epidemiology and health economics, traces the case’s genesis back to October 2020 when Harvard University medicine professor Martin Kulldorff, Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and he – joined hands to publish The Great Barrington Declaration during the peak of the Covid pandemic.
In brief, the Declaration urged for a stop to economic lockdowns and similar other restrictive policies. The argument was that they “disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole”. The Declaration endorsed a “focused protection” approach which meant “strong measures to protect high-risk populations” and allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions.” Many doctors and public health scientists signed the statement.
Bhattacharya writes that the proposal was viewed by high government officials like Anthony Fauci and others as “a kind of heresy.” Officials “targeted” the Declaration for suppression on social media. “Almost immediately, social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored mentions of the Declaration. As The Free Press revealed in its Twitter Files reporting, in 2021 Twitter blacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration,” he writes.
His parents had grown up in poverty, Bhattacharya writes, his mother in a Kolkata slum. In the 1970s, his father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, migrated to the USA and became a successful engineer. His mother ran a family daycare business. When 19, he became an American citizen internalizing the values of the country.
“The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target,” he writes.
The pushback started in August 2022 when the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked him “to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The aim of the suit was to end the government’s role in this censorship-and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square,” says Bhattacharya.
The Stanford professor underlines that he is not a political person and isn’t registered with a political party. “I have always viewed my job as telling people honestly about the data issues, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans liked the message. Yet at the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks. I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love,” he writes in the article headlined, “The government censored me and other scientists. We fought back-and won.”
Earlier this year, a preliminary injunction was issued in the case, ordering “the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech.” An administrative stay followed. On Friday, however, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit “unanimously restored a modified version of the preliminary injunction.”
In its Sept 8 report, headlined, “Appeals court slaps Biden administration for contact with social media companies,” npr.org quoted the judges as saying, “The officials have engaged in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government…The harms that radiate from such conduct extend far beyond just the Plaintiffs; it impacts every social-media user.”
The report also pointed out, “Still, the order limits the scale of the injunction, which had previously included the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services. Today’s order applies only to the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI.”
Concluding his article, Bhattacharya explained what was at stake. “Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.”
“The victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic,” writes Jay (shortened from Jayanta) Bhattacharya in a fascinating account detailing the why and how of the legal action, published online in The Free Press (thefp.com) on Monday.
Bhattacharya, who researches epidemiology and health economics, traces the case’s genesis back to October 2020 when Harvard University medicine professor Martin Kulldorff, Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and he – joined hands to publish The Great Barrington Declaration during the peak of the Covid pandemic.
In brief, the Declaration urged for a stop to economic lockdowns and similar other restrictive policies. The argument was that they “disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole”. The Declaration endorsed a “focused protection” approach which meant “strong measures to protect high-risk populations” and allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions.” Many doctors and public health scientists signed the statement.
Bhattacharya writes that the proposal was viewed by high government officials like Anthony Fauci and others as “a kind of heresy.” Officials “targeted” the Declaration for suppression on social media. “Almost immediately, social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored mentions of the Declaration. As The Free Press revealed in its Twitter Files reporting, in 2021 Twitter blacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration,” he writes.
His parents had grown up in poverty, Bhattacharya writes, his mother in a Kolkata slum. In the 1970s, his father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, migrated to the USA and became a successful engineer. His mother ran a family daycare business. When 19, he became an American citizen internalizing the values of the country.
“The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target,” he writes.
The pushback started in August 2022 when the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked him “to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The aim of the suit was to end the government’s role in this censorship-and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square,” says Bhattacharya.
The Stanford professor underlines that he is not a political person and isn’t registered with a political party. “I have always viewed my job as telling people honestly about the data issues, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans liked the message. Yet at the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks. I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love,” he writes in the article headlined, “The government censored me and other scientists. We fought back-and won.”
Earlier this year, a preliminary injunction was issued in the case, ordering “the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech.” An administrative stay followed. On Friday, however, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit “unanimously restored a modified version of the preliminary injunction.”
In its Sept 8 report, headlined, “Appeals court slaps Biden administration for contact with social media companies,” npr.org quoted the judges as saying, “The officials have engaged in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government…The harms that radiate from such conduct extend far beyond just the Plaintiffs; it impacts every social-media user.”
The report also pointed out, “Still, the order limits the scale of the injunction, which had previously included the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services. Today’s order applies only to the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI.”
Concluding his article, Bhattacharya explained what was at stake. “Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.”