RFK Jr. Loses Bid to Force YouTube to Re-Post Anti-Vax Videos

Google LLC and YouTube LLC won’t be required to immediately restore videos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines to their platform because he’s unlikely to succeed on the merits of his free speech claims against the companies, a federal trial court said.

Kennedy, who is seeking to be the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, alleges that Google’s subsidiary YouTube violated his First Amendment right to political speech when it took down the videos due to its medical and vaccine misinformation policies.

The suit is likely to fail because Google and YouTube aren’t state actors subject to the free speech clause of the First Amendment, the US District Court for the Northern District of California said.

Judge Trina L. Thompson therefore denied Kennedy’s motion for a temporary restraining order that would bar the tech giants from using their policies to keep the videos off their platform.

Emails between government officials and Google personnel about trends in vaccine misinformation and “vaccination hesitation” aren’t enough to show that YouTube’s decisions were state decisions or to show a conspiracy to censor speech, Thompson said in her ruling Wednesday. There is no evidence that any government official “demanded that Google adopt a Covid-19 medical misinformation or vaccine misinformation policy,” she said.

“Moreover, there is no evidence before the court that government officials communicated with Google regarding Kennedy at all,” Thompson said.

The evidence instead shows that “communications between officials from the White House, Office of the Surgeon General, and Center for Disease Control and Prevent and Google” constituted “consultation and information sharing,” she said.

Kennedy’s complaint, filed on August 2, alleges that Biden administration officials worked with tech companies to “censor dissenting views”—including his—on the Covid-19 pandemic.

The case is scheduled for a hearing on Nov. 7 on his motion for a preliminary injunction and the companies’ motion to dismiss.

JW Howard Attorneys Ltd. represents Kennedy. Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP represents Google and YouTube.

The case is Kennedy Jr. v. Google LLC, N.D. Cal., No. 23-cv-03880, 8/23/23.