Why my amended complaint in Berenson v Biden matters so much

I have far stronger evidence of coercive censorship than Missouri v Biden. If my allegations can’t stick, the government can target social media companies -and their users - without meaningful limits.

Today, James Lawrence and I filed an amended complaint in Berenson v Biden, my federal lawsuit against top White House and Pfizer officials for their conspiracy to make Twitter ban me in 2021.

Some of you have told me you want me to write about issues other than my own suit. I get it. I do too. A lot is happening this summer, from the election to new data on mRNA jab failure to the assault on free speech worldwide - including Brazil’s closure of X and France’s arrest of the founder of the messenger app Telegram.

So I promise, I will not let the lawsuit take over Unreported Truths. But Berenson v Biden matters, and two words explain why: Edge case.

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(Support free speech. Support Unreported Truths.)

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Here’s what I mean: in June, the Supreme Court effectively dismissed Missouri v Biden, a lawsuit that alleged a broad federal social media censorship scheme.

The high court found the Missouri plaintiffs had not established “standing” to sue by showing government actions had caused social media companies to censor them.

Put another way, the court said the plaintiffs had not shown their injuries were “traceable” to the defense conduct, a minimum requirement to file a suit. Among other problems, the Missouri plaintiffs had issues with timing - some of the conduct they alleged had happened before Joe Biden became President - and in showing specific censorship demands related to their accounts.

One can argue the Supreme Court decided Missouri v Biden wrongly. One can argue lower courts were right to find the months-long jawboning from the White House and Surgeon General turned into unconstitutional pressure on social media companies. After all, the companies are well aware they depend on the federal government for Section 230, which gives them near-complete immunity from lawsuits.

Only last week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter that “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”

But whether you (or I) think the Supreme Court is wrong is irrelevant. The court has now said that top government officials are allowed broadly to push social media platforms to set standards over what kind of posts they will allow.

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(It is so on.)

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However.

The evidence I have marshaled for Berenson v Biden went far past that general jawboning even in my initial complaint. Now, thanks mostly to the fact Elon Musk and X voluntarily opened Twitter’s archives and provided me more information about my ban, and partly to the work of Congressional investigators, we have an even stronger suit.

I promised Elon and X that I would write about the information they provided on X, not Substack, and I’m sticking to that.

If you want to read about those documents, you can do so by reading these two pieces, headlined the “Pfizer/White House Files.” (Part 1 was published in June, and you can read it here; Part 2, published yesterday, is here.)

But the documents from X are not the only new information bolstering the complaint. The House committee has released documents showing that top Facebook officials viewed a former White House official named Andy Slavitt as serving as an intermediary for the Biden Administration in late July 2021, when the White House was heavily pressuring Facebook to censor vaccine skeptics.

And that fact matters deeply to Berenson v Biden. Why? Slavitt was at the heart of the conspiracy to censor me from the beginning. In April 2021, as the “senior advisor” to Biden’s Covid-19 response team, he pushed Twitter to ban me. Twitter refused - at the time.

Slavitt didn’t stop trying. In July 2021, he again repeatedly pushed for my ban. But Slavitt had officially resigned from the White House in June 2021. His lawyers have claimed he was acting as a private citizen in July and thus couldn’t be violating my First Amendment rights.

The Facebook emails suggest otherwise, showing that Facebook - Twitter’s closest competitor - viewed Slavitt as speaking for the government at the same time he was pressuring Twitter over me.

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(Late July 2021: Andy Slavitt - who officially has quit the Biden administration overa month earlier - tells a Facebook executive exactly what “The WH wants.”)

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Because of the central role that Slavitt played in the conspiracy to censor me, the question of whether he implied or said he was speaking for the government even after he officially left is crucial to Berenson v Biden. These documents provide important new evidence that he was, and that my strikes and ban and censorship were thus ultimately traceable - that word again - to government pressure.

Every detail is important, and the amended complaint, which totals 94 pages, is full of them.

All those details add up to one big picture: I have a MUCH stronger case than Missouri v Biden.

Timing is not a problem. Twitter took no public action against me before the federal government began pressuring it.

Traceability is not a problem. Over and over, Slavitt and the other conspirators made specific complaints about my accounts, trying to force Twitter to ban me. They did so to the same Twitter lobbyists who wanted to avoid public and private pressure from the Biden administration and protect Section 230.

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(I’ll keep it simple and repeat myself. Support free speech. Support Unreported Truths.)

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I think Berenson v Biden will move ahead and survive the defense motions to dismiss.

But if it does not, if federal Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke dismisses it before even allowing discovery and appeals courts back that decision, free speech on the Internet will be close to dead. Federal officials will know that they face effectively NO limits on the pressure the government can put on social media companies. Explicitly threatening to shut platforms if they don’t ban individual users will still be unconstitutional, but not much else.

So, yes, Berenson v Biden matters, even more now than it did when we first filed, precisely because the facts we have are so compelling.

Welcome to the edge case.