YUUlUuSE, ICur WIC Ur vC дуии, 10о-у.
61. Johnson, "BBC 'Misrepresented' Covid Risk."
62. The Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri declined to rule on the merits of the case, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring suit.
63. Missouri v. Biden, 83 F. 4th 350, 359 (sth Cir. 2023).
64. Missouri v. Biden, 382.
65. Yoel Roth, "Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden," Jawboning (blog), Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia Uni-versity, September 27, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting-the-facts-straight-some
-observations-on-the-fifth-circuit-ruling-in-missouri-v-biden-1.
66. Missouri v. Biden, 362.
67. Missouri v. Biden, 367.
68. Missouri v. Biden, 371-72.
324 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
69. Missouri v. Biden, 366.
70. Missouri v. Biden, 372.
71. Cited in John H. Cochrane, "Atlas Agonistes," The Grumpy Economist, September 15, 2020, https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/09/altas-agonistes.html.
72. Woolhouse, Year the World Went Mad, 220.
73. Anderberg, The Herd, 185.
74. @unusual_whales, "Mark Zuckerberg of Meta on Covid censoring," X, June 11, 2023, 10:01 p.m., https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1668075898539585537.
75. See Paul D. Thacker, "NEW EMAILS: Biden White House Behind Facebook Censorship of the BMJ's Pfizer Investigation," Disinformation Chronicle, January 17, 2023; see Paul D. Thacker,
"NEW EMAILS," X, January 17, 2023, https://x.com/thackerpd/status/1615322067510886403
?lang-en.
76. Missouri v. Biden, U.S. Dist. Ct., West. Dist. of La., Case 3:22-Cv-01213, 07/04/23, 129 fn.
655, https://ago.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf.

Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since confirmed and expressed regret about his company's involvement in censoring Covid dissenters: "Unfortunately, I think the establishment... kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true."74 The communications taken down, according to an email from a Facebook employee to Andy Slavitt, President Biden's White House senior adviser for the Covid response, included known "true content"s that was judged to promote vaccine hesitancy. 6
The fight against Covid was held by many to be the moral equivalent of war, and as in past wars, government officials concluded that national unity was so imperative that achieving it justified censorship of dissenting viewpoints.

The Censorship of Critics
Social media companies participated in suppressing debate concerning Covid. The extent of government involvement in the monitoring, de-platforming, and "de-boosting" of dissent around official Covid policy has become clearer thanks to the U.S. federal court case Missouri v.
Biden, which we can discuss only briefly. Thanks to testimony and evidence obtained in that case, among other sources, we now know that White House officials were deeply involved in social media censorship activities, along with officials from the CDC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other federal agencies.
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya were among the plaintiffs in the case originally known as Missouri v. Biden, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal as Murthy v. Missouri (referencing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy). Both the federal district court and a court of appeals determined that numerous federal officials coerced or "significantly en-couraged" social media platforms to censor disfavored social media con-tent, much of it dealing with the Covid pandemic, in violation of the First Amendment.® The record in the case establishes that federal officials were "in regular contact" with all the major American social media companies about the spread of "misinformation" on their platforms.63 Officials pressed the platforms to remove or "deboost" disfavored content on contentious topics, such as on the efficacy of pandemic lockdowns, Covid vaccines, and the possible lab-leak origin of the pandemic. Officials' "jaw-

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