Listen to This Article: Finally, Good News: Free Speech Wins Big in Court

Finally, good news.

Pre-speech wins big in court.

Four years after the Twitter files, the Missouri V Biden case ends in a consent decree barring

government from threatening protected speech, a belated but important victory.

In the first week of December 2022, a group of reporters now scattered and divided over

the Iran War and other issues searched through a pile of raw correspondence at the San Francisco

Office of Twitter.

On file we found with 67 pages of complaints about content, mostly from state officials,

sent to an address marked misinformation at CIS security.

In one case, the Georgia Secretary of State's Office complained about a Fox 5 Atlanta report

titled, Computer Problems Bring Down Voting Machines in Spalding County.

The story about technical difficulties in Spalding County turned out to be accurate,

as a county-wide technical issue delayed voting.

Superior court judge Fletcher Sam's ordered the ballots be kept open in extra two hours

in 18 locations.

In those same 67 pages, we found a form letter informing the Georgia official that his

complaint about the Fox story had already been forwarded to our partners, who included

the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security and

the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University.

This was the first time an outsider had seen the plumbing of a wide-scale effort by federal

agencies like the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, to regulate MISS, DISS,

and malinformation in the social media landscape.

It took considerable effort to untangle the mechanism by which complaints of misinformation

were processed.

The process was deliberately confusing.

But the documents in the Twitter files ended up playing a role in helping a landmark

first amendment case already launched in the courts, called Missouri V. Biden.

The general public, if it knows about this case at all, heard about the alleged embarrassing

defeat plaintiffs like Dr. Aaron Karayati, future NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, and Harvard's

Dr. Martin Koldor suffered in the Supreme Court in early 2024.

This was often misreported, as the Supreme Court really punted on procedural issues and

sent the case back down to be decided.

It was forgotten until a consent decree was finally issued Tuesday, ending in victory

for the plaintiffs.

As Karayati wrote, the decree prohibits, the US Surgeon General, Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention, CDC, and Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA,

from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected

speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.