Judge Terry Doughty’s historic opinion in the censorship case Missouri v. Biden has been getting a lot of attention, especially after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed it. Rightly so. Now the U.S. Supreme Court says it will hear the case. This could be the most important Supreme Court term for free speech ever.
But there is another case that could have an even bigger effect on the freedom of American speech: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s case against Google, which has repeatedly censored Kennedy’s political speech on YouTube. With Kennedy launching an independent bid for the White House — and with Google doubling down on its censorship efforts — that lawsuit has taken on added importance.
After a hearing this week, Kennedy’s case could also soon be headed to the Supreme Court, which will have to grapple with the extraordinary efforts Big Tech has taken to silence government critics like Kennedy, and the danger created by the tech industry’s belief, shared by many government officials and legal scholars, that more censorship is needed. (I should note that I am one of the lawyers leading the Kennedy v. Google case.)
Before the 2016 election, Big Tech rarely censored anybody. They had tools that allowed users to block content they did not want to see. And they used algorithms to screen out obscene content. Otherwise, cyberspace — starting with the internet and then extending to the social media sites created for smartphones and tablets — was a public forum, the digital
