By Zachary Stieber
Some of the oldest media organizations in the world illegally colluded with Big Tech companies to censor news publishers, according to a new lawsuit.
Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC, and the other organizations violated U.S. law with the collusion, which was done after forming a new coalition called the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), the 108-page suit alleges.
The coalition was formed in 2020 to try to stop “harmful disinformation myths” and “fake news,” according to the BBC. Jessica Cecil of the BBC, the former head of TNI, has described the coalition as “cooperation between tech and media,” with the work including finding “practical ways to choke off” alleged false information from sources that aren’t part of the group.
That led to Big Tech censorship of competitors to the media organizations, such as Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of vaccine safety concerns, the nonprofit said in the new suit.
But the TNI has actually deemed accurate or possibly true information as false, including the possibility that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in China, Children’s Health Defense says.
“While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members,” the suit says. “The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.”
The suppression of competitors was done so out of economic self-interest and violated a U.S. law called the Sherman Act that bars a “group boycotts,” the complaint says.
Previous court rulings have defined a group boycott as “a concerted attempt by a group of competitors” to “disadvantage competitors by either directly denying or persuading or coercing suppliers or customers to deny relationships the competitors need in the competitive struggle” and as “cut[ting] off access to a supply, facility, or market necessary to enable the boycotted firm to compete.”
Children’s Health Defense and the other plaintiffs, including Jim Hoft, who founded the Gateway Pundit website, say they’ve lost millions of dollars due to censorship they’ve experienced.
They’re asking a federal court in Louisiana to enter an order declaring the conduct by the media organizations to be illegal. They also want an order barring the defendants from participating in the TNI and working together to boycott and censor other publishers, and are requesting damages.
A Washington Post spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the paper was not going to comment on pending litigation.
Spokespersons for the other defendants—Reuters, the Associated Press, and the BBC—did not respond to requests for comment. No Big Tech firms were named as defendants.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as a Democrat for president, is chairman of Children’s Health Defense, but has been on leave since he announced his bid.
The case was assigned to U.S. district judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, including Hoft, in a separate case against U.S. government officials for colluding with companies like Twitter to censor users.
Flurry of Suits
That case, Missouri v. Biden, has revealed evidence through discovery and depositions that the federal government under presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden successfully pressured Big Tech firms to crack down on users, even if the information they shared was true.
A flurry of suits have been lodged in recent months based in part on the evidence.
A group of people with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 vaccine injuries sued Biden and top U.S. officials in May, alleging the officials violated their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. Earlier that month, Hoft and his lawyers said in a suit that so-called disinformation researchers like Stanford University’s Alex Stamos illegally pressured social media platforms to censor users.
Children’s Health Defense was behind another suit filed in March against Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and other officials, arguing their pressure campaign infringed on constitutional rights.
Government officials have argued that the suits lack merit.
In the Missouri case, lawyers for the government said that the public and private statements made by officials did not rise to the level of coercion, a standard established in previous rulings.
“Even if certain defendants ‘requested’ that, or urged, social media companies do more to contain misinformation, any content moderation decisions made by social media companies ultimately ‘rested with’ those companies,” they said. “Even emphatic requests or strongly worded urging—President Biden saying failing to take action against misinformation results in ‘killing people’—do not plausibly amount to coercion.”
Doughty largely rejected the arguments when he spurned the government’s motion to dismiss the case, pointing to threats officials made “in an attempt to effectuate its censorship program.”
Murthy, for example, sent a formal request for information to the companies “as an implied threat of future regulation to pressure them to increase censorship,” the judge said.
He added, “The court finds that plaintiffs have plausibly alleged state action under the theory of significant encouragement and/or coercion.”
