In a significant legal victory against free speech censorship, a Kolkata-born professor at Stanford University, in collaboration with fellow scientists, successfully challenged the U.S. government.
This triumph, as detailed in an account by Jay (shortened from Jayanta) Bhattacharya, is not just a personal victory but a win for every American who experienced the heavy-handed suppression of free speech during the pandemic. Bhattacharya, a researcher in epidemiology and health economics, traces the origins of the case back to October 2020 when he, along with Harvard University medicine professor Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, published The Great Barrington Declaration at the peak of the Covid pandemic.
In essence, the Declaration advocated against economic lockdowns and other restrictive policies, arguing that they disproportionately harmed the young and economically disadvantaged while offering limited benefits to society as a whole. Instead, it proposed a “focused protection” approach, emphasizing strong measures to safeguard high-risk populations while allowing lower-risk individuals to resume normal life with reasonable precautions. Many doctors and public health scientists endorsed this statement.
However, the proposal was met with resistance from high-ranking government officials, including Anthony Fauci, who considered it heretical. Social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook were quick to suppress any mentions of the Declaration. Twitter even blacklisted Bhattacharya in 2021 for sharing a link to the Great Barrington Declaration.
Bhattacharya’s parents, who grew up in poverty, immigrated to the USA in the 1970s. His father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist, achieved success, while his mother operated a family daycare business. Bhattacharya became an American citizen at the age of 19, embracing the core American value of free speech. He never anticipated a time when the U.S. government would infringe upon this fundamental right or when he would become a target of such actions.
The pushback against censorship began in August 2022 when the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana invited Bhattacharya to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. Their goal was to end the government’s involvement in censoring free speech on social media and restore the digital town square’s free speech rights for all Americans.
Earlier this year, a preliminary injunction was issued in the case, instructing the federal government to cease pressuring social media companies to censor protected free speech. While an administrative stay followed, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously reinstated a modified version of the preliminary injunction on Friday.
In their ruling, the judges stated that government officials had engaged in a broad pressure campaign to coerce social media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government. They noted that the harm resulting from such actions extended far beyond the plaintiffs and impacted every social media user.
To conclude his article, Bhattacharya emphasized the importance of vigilance in holding an overreaching government accountable for violating fundamental rights, asserting that it is only the people who can safeguard these rights.
