Robert F. Kennedy Jr. failed to show YouTube was a “state actor” when it removed his videos allegedly containing vaccine misinformation, a federal appeals court said Monday.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that denied Kennedy’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would have required Google LLC to restore his YouTube videos.
Kennedy failed to show that YouTube’s removal of at least two of his videos was at the behest of the government, the three-judge panel for the appeals court said.
“Kennedy has not rebutted Google’s claim that it exercised its independent editorial choice in removing his videos,” the four-page opinion said. “Nor has Kennedy identified any specific communications from a federal official to Google concerning the removed Kennedy videos, or identified any threatening or coercive communication.”
Kennedy sued Google in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last year for First Amendment violations after the platform removed his videos for flouting medical and vaccine misinformation policies.
The Ninth Circuit ruling is the latest in a series of legal losses of Kennedy, who has sued a number of tech companies and the government over censorship on social media platforms. The Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled that Meta Platforms Inc. didn’t violate the First Amendment rights of Children’s Health Defense—a Kennedy-backed anti-vaccine group—when Facebook removed the group’s posts.
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