Robert Kennedy Jr., the nephew of slain US President “JFK”, and other anti-vaccine activists have filed a lawsuit in the United States against several media outlets who are fighting misinformation together.
The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Texas, accuses the media of violating US competition laws by forming an unlawful agreement to censor publishers of dissenting views.
It specifically targets the daily Washington Post, the BBC and the AP and Reuters agencies, as members of the “Trusted News Initiative”.
AFP is also a member of this partnership between major international media and digital platforms, such as Facebook or Google, which aims to identify and prevent the dissemination of false information.
“The competition laws have a name for this type of + industrial partnership +: + group boycott +”, write the plaintiffs, who accuse the media of having entered into this agreement in order to “exclude” their competitors.
Because of it, they write, publishers have been “censored, demonetized, relegated, strangled, cast back into darkness, and/or banned entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.”
The Initiative “removes accurate and legitimate information to satisfy the economic interests of its members”, can we still read in this complaint which, in addition to Mr. Kennedy, is brought by far-right media and doctors known for their positions against vaccines.
They are calling for a trial before a jury to fix damages and to prohibit the Initiative from continuing to work with the tech giants.
Robert Kennedy Junior, 68, is the son of former Democratic Justice Minister and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, but also the nephew of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was killed five years earlier.
Since 2005, he has been spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines, in particular linking autism to one of their components.