Texas AG, Daily Wire, Federalist Accuse Government of Massive ‘Censorship Scheme’

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the Daily Wire and Federalist media outlets seek declaratory and injunctive relief to stop the State Department from running “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press” in the history of the U.S., said their complaint Wednesday (docket 6:23-cv-00609) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler. The complaint draws heavily from documents produced in discovery in Missouri v. Biden.

The State Department, through its Global Engagement Center (GEC), “is actively intervening” to render “disfavored” press outlets unprofitable by funding the marketing and promotion of “censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” alleged the complaint. Named as defendants are Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five of his State Department colleagues.

The defendants have been granted "no statutory authority to fund or promote censorship technology or censorship enterprises that target the American press,” targeting “disfavored” domestic news organizations on grounds that they’re purveyors of disinformation, said the complaint. There is no “enumerated general power” to censor speech or the press found in the Constitution, and the First Amendment “expressly forbids it,” it said.

The “full breadth” of GEC’s “censorship scheme” won’t be known until after discovery, said the complaint. It alleges that GEC has funded and promoted the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard Technologies as “American censorship enterprises.” Those entities “generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints,” it said.

GDI and NewsGuard brand The Daily Wire and the Federalist as “unreliable” or “risky,” injuring them “by starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech,” said the complaint. That’s all as a “direct result” of the government’s “unlawful censorship scheme,” it said.

The censorship scheme “also undermines Texas law, which requires social media companies with market power to act as common carriers,” said the complaint. The scheme thus “interferes” with the state’s “sovereign interest in creating and enforcing a legal code,” it said.

Americans increasingly rely on the new digital media for their source of news, said the complaint. It cited Pew Research data showing that only 37% of U.S. adults often or sometimes get their news from traditional print publications. As the new digital media gained strength, the federal government conspired with “legacy media,” Big Tech, social media companies and software and technology developers “to censor the press that do not adhere to the preferred views of federal officials,” it said.

The Daily Wire embraces “high standards of journalism” but doesn’t claim to be without conservative bias, said the complaint. The Federalist also “adopts high standards of journalism while embracing its right-of-center perspective,” it said. The federal government’s efforts to “silence” the new media have been detailed in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, “with preliminary evidence showing a vast and unprecedented government-censorship complex unparalleled in American history,” it said.

The injunction imposed July 4 in Missouri v. Biden to bar officials from the White House and four federal agencies from coercing social media platforms to moderate their content is currently stayed, pending U.S. Supreme Court review. The State Department is not among the federal agencies named in the injunction.

When Congress created the GEC in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017, it prohibited the agency from using appropriated funds “to counter Americans’ speech,” said the complaint. Many of GEC’s activities and initiatives were performed by the State Department’s “alter ego,” the Park Capital Investment Group, which the department funded with a $3 million contract, it said.