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The U.S. government said it intends to file a statement of interest in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and a group of independent journalists against the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership formed by several of the world’s largest news organizations.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleges that TNI violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by collectively colluding with tech giants to censor independent news outlets in a move designed specifically to cripple the smaller publishers’ ability to compete.
TNI members include legacy media giants the BBC, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Washington Post.
The case had languished until last week, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed its five-page notice with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In its notice, DOJ attorneys said that cases “addressing anticompetitive collusion among competitors over product features” are “a particular concern of the federal government.” The DOJ said it intends to file its statement of interest within the next three weeks, by July 18.
According to Renata Hesse, co-chair-elect of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Law Section, the DOJ occasionally files statements of interest in cases before federal district courts “when it wishes to inform the court about some legal principle that is an issue in a case and related to [its] competition mission.”
CHD CEO Mary Holland called the DOJ’s announcement a “welcome” development, noting that “federal enforcement of antitrust [law] in recent years has been lax.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD’s general counsel, said:
“That the DOJ, which obviously has an interest in the enforcement of federal law, including antitrust law, is stepping in here, hopefully means this case will move forward.
“The interest of the DOJ may accelerate the case now, and I am awaiting the statement of interest here with great interest.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against TNI include CHD; Creative Destruction Media; TrialSite News; Ty and Charlene Bollinger, founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines; Erin Elizabeth Finn, publisher of Health Nut News; Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit; Jeff Crouere, host of “Ringside Politics”; chiropractor Ben Tapper; Dr. Joseph Mercola and independent journalist Ben Swann.
‘They colluded expressly to suppress economic competition’
In their complaint, the plaintiffs allege they were censored, banned, deplatformed, shadow-banned or otherwise penalized by the Big Tech firms partnering with the TNI because the views and content they published were deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation” and subsequently censored.
Core partners of TNI’s “coalition of the willing” include the AP, Agence France Press, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union, the Financial Times, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and The Washington Post.
According to TNI’s website, its partners collaborate “to tackle harmful disinformation in real time.”
The lawsuit provides extensive evidence, including public statements by TNI staff and partners.
One such example is a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation” by suggesting the rivalry legacy media organizations face is less between one another and more:
“Between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world.”
The lawsuit alleges this quote demonstrates evidence of anti-competitive collusion and of TNI members’ economic motivation to stifle this “threat”: “a paradigmatic antitrust violation … to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”
“TNI’s own terms make it clear that their concern was about market share, not just so-called misinformation,” Holland said. “They colluded expressly to suppress economic competition.”
TNI allegedly targeted speech countering establishment COVID narratives
The lawsuit also alleges that TNI members “agreed in 2020 that their ‘ground-breaking collaboration’ would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would ‘work together to … ensure [that] harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks’” and “jointly [combat] fraud and misinformation about the virus.”
According to the complaint, Big Tech firms based their decisions to censor content on determinations made by TNI through its “early warning system,” which “warned” partner news organizations about an individual or outlet that was disseminating purported “misinformation.”
The TNI’s legacy media and Big Tech firms then acted in concert — described in legal terms as a “group boycott” — to remove such voices and perspectives from their platforms.
This resulted in a significant loss of visibility and revenue for the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs allege.
“Group boycotts — actions taken to unjustifiably limit competition — are illegal under U.S. antitrust law,” Mack Rosenberg said.
These arguments, which center around circumstantial evidence of horizontal agreement and economic collusion among the defendants and Big Tech firms, form the basis of the lawsuit’s antitrust claims.
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Since the lawsuit was filed, it has moved from federal courts in Texas and Louisiana before making its way to the District of Columbia.
In August 2023, attorneys for the defendants unsuccessfully sought to dismiss the case. Later that month, Jeff Landry, then attorney general of Louisiana and now the state’s governor, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs.
An amicus brief is filed by non-parties to a lawsuit to provide information that has a bearing on the issues and to assist the court in reaching the correct decision.
The plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and treble damages from reduced visibility and advertising revenue.
Related articles in The Defender
- CHD Sues Major Media Organizations Alleging Free Speech and Antitrust Violations
- Breaking: Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content
- Louisiana Attorney General Files Amicus Brief in CHD’s Landmark Suit Against Trusted News Initiative
- Australia’s Public Broadcaster Partners With Trusted News Initiative to ‘Protect Public’ From ‘Misinformation’
