The U.S. Department of Justice has stepped into a two year-old lawsuit over an alleged attempt by legacy media to suppress competition from non-traditional news publishers.
On
Friday, the DOJ filed a statement of interest that would extend antitrust protections to the “marketplace of ideas.”
The defendants in the case, including the Washington
Post, BBC, Associated Press and Reuters, sought to“free major news organizations and dominant digital platforms to block competitive threats that offer alternative, competing
viewpoints,” the DOJ says in its filing.
“When companies abuse their market power to block out and deplatform independent voices and protect legacy media, they harm
competition and threaten the free flow of information on which consumers depend,” says Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust
Division.
It is not yet clear if this is a frivolous action designed to intimidate or one that will have long-term consequences for mainstream news organizations.
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The case
dates back to 2023, when the Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other plaintiffs filed suit, alleging that the defendants entered into an industry partnership called the
Trusted News Initiative with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter.
Their goal was to “suppress competition from independent perspectives that rival mainstream media,”
the complaint states.
The document continues, “While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating
online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
Just what
information did TNI members seek to suppress?
According to the original complaint, they sought to block “(A) reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan,
China; (B) reporting that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) reporting that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) reporting that compromising emails and videos were
found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.”
In this reporter’s memory, most of those claims received fairly widespread circulation.
What’s the harm of the
alleged censorship? Alternative online media have been “censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
Instagram, and Linked-In,” the complaint continues.
Meanwhile, the case has changed venue and the defendants have sought dismissal. It is now on file with the U.S. District for the
District of Columbia. The status is unclear.