A Legal Path to Restoration of Free Speech

Government contracts with IT giants must be conditional on their maintenance of a level playing field

Thomas Jefferson taught us that freedom of speech is an essential foundation for a responsive government and for everything we value in public life. In the last decade, freedom of speech has been de-legitimized in a narrative that pretends to protect us from “misinformation” and micro-aggressions.

In on-line communications, we have already lost a large part of our freedom. We are routinely throttled by AI algorithms that bias search results and block the connections that disseminate ideas.

Because so much of our communication is mediated by the Internet, and because Internet traffic is channeled through a handful of IT corporations, restoration of our freedom requires a change in the behavior of these corporations.

In 1999, Google leapfrogged to dominance in search engines with the simple idea of tracking what people were actually reading and promoting search results accordingly. Now Google and other tech giants routinely insert their own judgment (or the government’s, or the corporations’ or paid sponsors') into recommendations and search results. LLMs are the worst offenders, and the least transparent. How can we return to unbiased algorithms?

The Federal Government has huge contracts with all the tech giants. They have demonstrated they have the power to demand censorship and bias in return for ongoing contracts.

Conversely, this means that the Government also has the power to compel a level playing field — in Elon’s words, freedom of reach as well as freedom of speech.

There is some sentiment in the incoming Trump administration for a return in the direction of free speech; but I don’t think we can rely on Trump to push aggressively for the right of people to disagree with him.

My proposal is a lawsuit to compel the government to use the power of the purse to enforce freedom of reach as well as freedom of speech in social media. We would seek a ruling that it is a violation of the First Amendment for the Federal government to contract with any company that censors, either by de-platforming or by algorithms that demote content they disagree with.

The argument is that once the Government has established an ongoing financial relationship with a contractor, there is implicit pressure for the contractor to conform to the Government’s ideology, even if there is no explicit tit-for-tat in the contract. The Government’s power to disburse money in a way that promotes their own propaganda is so great and so dangerous that it must be explicitly renounced in a way enforceable by law

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