The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has rejected a request by Democrat primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a temporary restraining order preventing Google-owned YouTube from censoring his content.
Despite legacy media fears that tech platforms are relaxing their censorship efforts in response to Elon Musk’s changes at Twitter/X, YouTube recently doubled down on its “medical misinformation” policy, which it has used as a pretext to censor RFK Jr., who is Joe Biden’s closest competitor in the Democrat party primary, on several occasions.
Sundar Pichai CEO of Google ( Carsten Koall /Getty)
“The Court finds that the First Amendment claim is unlikely to succeed on the merits because Google and YouTube are not state actors,” wrote Judge Trina Thompson, who was nominated to serve on the Court by Joe Biden in 2021, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2022.
“Second, Plaintiff was not, and will not, be irreparably harmed if a temporary restraining order is not issued because he does not demonstrate urgency or that he will not be able to share his videos through other sites and methods.”
In the application for a restraining order, attorneys for Kennedy sought to prevent YouTube from using its “medical misinformation” policy to censor videos of the candidate during his campaign in the 2024 election.
In the ruling, Judge Thompson also argued that even if Kennedy could establish that YouTube is a state actor, the First Amendment does not necessarily protect “medical misinformation.”
Citing previous cases that recognized a public interest consideration in First Amendment cases, Thompson wrote “the coronavirus still poses a health risk to certain individuals, and it would not serve the public interest to let medical misinformation proliferate on YouTube.”
The case is Kennedy Jr. v. Google, 3:23-cv-03880-TLT in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.