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Pre-speech wins big in court.
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Four years after the Twitter files, the Missouri V Biden case ends in a consent decree barring
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government from threatening protected speech, a belated but important victory.
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In the first week of December 2022, a group of reporters now scattered and divided over
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the Iran War and other issues searched through a pile of raw correspondence at the San Francisco
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On file we found with 67 pages of complaints about content, mostly from state officials,
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sent to an address marked misinformation at CIS security.
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In one case, the Georgia Secretary of State's Office complained about a Fox 5 Atlanta report
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titled, Computer Problems Bring Down Voting Machines in Spalding County.
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The story about technical difficulties in Spalding County turned out to be accurate,
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as a county-wide technical issue delayed voting.
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Superior court judge Fletcher Sam's ordered the ballots be kept open in extra two hours
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In those same 67 pages, we found a form letter informing the Georgia official that his
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complaint about the Fox story had already been forwarded to our partners, who included
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the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security and
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the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University.
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This was the first time an outsider had seen the plumbing of a wide-scale effort by federal
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agencies like the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, to regulate MISS, DISS,
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and malinformation in the social media landscape.
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It took considerable effort to untangle the mechanism by which complaints of misinformation
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The process was deliberately confusing.
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But the documents in the Twitter files ended up playing a role in helping a landmark
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first amendment case already launched in the courts, called Missouri V. Biden.
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The general public, if it knows about this case at all, heard about the alleged embarrassing
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defeat plaintiffs like Dr. Aaron Karayati, future NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, and Harvard's
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Dr. Martin Koldor suffered in the Supreme Court in early 2024.
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This was often misreported, as the Supreme Court really punted on procedural issues and
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sent the case back down to be decided.
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It was forgotten until a consent decree was finally issued Tuesday, ending in victory
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As Karayati wrote, the decree prohibits, the US Surgeon General, Centers for Disease
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Control and Prevention, CDC, and Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA,
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from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected
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speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.