MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade declared that there was “merit” to a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri on Wednesday, one day after a federal judged barred several Biden administration agencies from communicating with social media companies in connection about speech protected by the First Amendment.

The judge found that the plaintiffs had “presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far reaching and widespread censorship campaign.”

Asked about her takeaways from the ruling, McQuade, a former U.S. attorney appointed by Barack Obama, said the ruling and lawsuit should be evaluated separately:

I think it’s important to separate two things. One is the opinion itself where this judge writes 155 pages, is clearly swinging from the fences, buys into this whole idea that this is some sort of vast censorship conspiracy against conservative voices, and it’s really quite distracting.

But if you look at the substance of the lawsuit, there’s actually some merit there. We don’t want the government telling social media what they can and can’t do. But it’s tricky because as long as I’ve been in government, the government does work cooperatively with social media companies to remove things from ISIS and Al-Qaeda for example, to remove things put up by child pornographers. And one of the things that is alleged here is that the government was asking the social media companies to take down falsehoods about Covid and home remedies and things that could be very dangerous. And so there is, I have to believe, some room for the government to try to act in the best interest of the public in coordinating messaging with social media companies.

But at the same time, there are some allegations of some very heavy-handed tactics here where the government was pressuring social media companies to say what it wanted to say. I don’t know that they go so far as to suggest that this administration was acting in bad-faith, but the point is: When the government is telling social media companies what to do, there is a risk of censorship there. So I think it’ll be important to see how this case shakes out as it proceeds.

Watch above via MSNBC.

The post MSNBC Analyst Concedes There’s ‘Merit’ to Social Media Covid Censorship Lawsuit: ‘Allegations of Some Very Heavy-Handed Tactics’ first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/y2QUbdn