Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. government has reached a settlement with a former New York Times reporter who was kicked off Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic for posts about vaccines.

Officials in a settlement agreement dated May 11 and obtained by The Epoch Times said that the government “did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s,” referring to former New York reporter Alex Berenson.

Officials said they were paying Berenson $150,000 to settle the case, which wasfiledin 2023 against then-President Joe Biden, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and others. In exchange, Berenson moved to dismiss the case.

“I'd like to thank the Trump administration for acknowledging the government’s unconstitutional actions against me in 2021 and standing for my First Amendment rights as a journalist and American,” Berenson told The Epoch Times in an email.

The government under President Donald Trump alreadysettleda case raising similar issues and involving multiple states, agreeing not to take actions “to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

Twitter banned Berenson in 2021 after he wrote in opposition to mandating COVID-19 vaccination because “it doesn’t stop infection or transmission.”

Berenson and Twitter settled a different lawsuit arising from the same incidents, with Twitteracknowledgingthat it should not have banned the journalist.

Emails disclosed in other litigation showed that U.S. officials during the Biden administration, as well as Gottlieb, who is also a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, communicated to Twitter executives their view that Berenson’s posts violated Twitter rules and that he should be punished.

Berenson said in his lawsuit that the actions violated his First Amendment rights.

Source: ZeroHedge News