Federal agencies are barred from pressuring social media companies to restrict the public’s free speech — a confirmation that the First Amendment blocks elected officials in the United States from trying to restrict free speech.
The case stemmed from actions taken by the Biden administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The nonprofit New Civil Liberties Alliance, representing the plaintiffs, reached a consent decree for their three clients who claimed that the “federal government Defendants unlawfully pressured, coerced, induced, and encouraged major social media platforms to censor their posts about COVID-19, the Hunter Biden laptop report, and the 2020 Presidential election,” per the court filing.
The terms of the agreement will prohibit the federal government, specifically the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and their employees and agents, from influencing social media companies to shut down content that contradicts the White House’s stance on an issue.
In 2022, after the Biden administration appealed a lower court’s ruling that had blocked the federal government’s enforcement of a COVID-19 vaccine requirement on healthcare workers tied to Medicare and Medicaid funding, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Biden Administration a stay on the injunction.
The NCLA continued to pursue litigation in the lower courts.
After “years of unrelenting litigation,” former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who sued the Biden administration, said on social media, “this is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine. It locks in the First Amendment principle we fought for: modern technology doesn’t erase your rights, and government labels don’t strip speech of protection. The deep state just got checked.”
The NCLA said the settlement further expounds on one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders in his second term that condemned the Biden administration’s “whole of government” approach to “government-induced social media censorship.”
Trump’s executive order told federal agencies to stop the practice of trying to censor Americans’ speech:
“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
The consent decree is pending final approval from U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana’s Western District.